Social media has come a long way since Sixdegrees.com launched as the first social media site in May 1997. 25 years on, it is an essential part of most people’s days, informing, connecting and entertaining us all day long.
Sixdegrees.com
SixDegrees.com lasted from 1997 to 2000 and was named after the concept that you’re only ever six connections away from any human on the planet. In his book The Facebook Effect, author David Kirkpatrick wrote that Sixdegrees.com was “the first online business that attempted to identify and map a set of real relationships between real people using their real names.”
LiveJournal.com
Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal in April 1999, to update his high school friends on his activities. Imagine a basic noughties website and ta-dah, you have LiveJournal’s home page – the addition of Frank the goat really makes it. The bigger surprise is that LiveJournal is still going strong in Russia, where it is used for political commentary in particular.
Friendster
Before Facebook, Myspace and Hi5, Friendster went live in 2003 with an aim to connect people for dating and friendship. It was one of the first social networks to hit 1 million users, and just a few months after launch it had 3 million users. It’s name follows in the footsteps of music sharing platform Napster. The site closed down in 2015.
Did you know that LinkedIn launched before Facebook? LinkedIn was launched in 2003 by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal. Its aim was to connect business professionals. It didn’t find instant popularity though and only became a profitable business in 2006.
Myspace
One of the most successful early social media platforms, Myspace was the first social network to reach a global audience, rather than mostly US-based. Launched in 2003, it was a response to Friendster’s takeover, allowing users to create “profile” pages featuring photographs, music, their interests, and link to others profiles. Between 2005 and 2008 it was the most popular social media site.
Anyone who’s seen The Social Network knows the history of how Mark Zuckerberg set up The Facebook while still a college student at Harvard. Originally only open to people with academic email addresses, Facebook – now called Meta – has grown to become the biggest and most influential social media platform.
Flickr
Before we had Pinterest and Instagram, Flickr was the ultimate picture-led social media site. Launched back in 2004, it was primarily used to host high-resolution photos for other blogs and sites.
Hi5
Who remembers this one? In 2007, Hi5 was the second most successful social media network after Myspace. Launches in 2003 by Ramu Yalamanch, it was similar to the other networks at the time, focussing on building a network of connections. Later, it refocussed itself as a social network gaming platform.
Bebo
Another early noughties social media star. Like The Facebook, when Bebo launched in 2005, it was aimed at the 13 – 30 age bracket. What does Bebo mean? Well, nothing to start with. Founders Xochi and Michael Birch later decided it stood for “Blog Early, Blog Often.”
YouTube
Another Internet legend up next. YouTube began with the video ‘Me at the zoo’ uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim in April 2005. Today it is the second-most visited site in the world after Google.
With the confident tagline “the front page of the internet” Reddit was either destined for greatness or failure when it launched in 2005. So far, it’s the latter. There are now 52 million Redditors active on the site everyday across a huge range of topics.
For many of us who use Twitter daily for work or play, it’s hard to imagine a world without Twitter. It launched in July 2006 as a platform to share short SMS-style messages with the wider world. Twitter has come a long way since encouraging users to answer “What are you doing?”
Tumblr
The year after Twitter was born, web users were offered another longer-form blogging platform: Tumblr. On 19 February 2007, Tumblr launched, providing users with an easy-to-use platform to share others’ content. An immediate success, within two weeks of the launch Tumblr gained 75,000 users.
Launching in 2010, the photo-sharing social network was launched as an online pinboard for users to collect inspiring images in one place. Although the Beta login page looked very unassuming, the idea caught on quickly and by 2012 it had more than 20 million users.
The photo-sharing social media platform launched on October 6, 2010. It was originally a mobile app rather than a website, hence there’s not much to see here. From the website at the time founders were very keen to express it was free though!
Snapchat
When Snapchat launched in 2011, its selling point was photo messages and telling people if others took a screenshot. Check out the old-school iPhone on their website!
TikTok
Last but by no means least, we have the new kid on the block, TikTok. Launched in September 2016, TikTok is first and foremost a phone app, so there’s not much to see here on the website.
Olivia is a digital journalist studying Interactive Journalism at City, University of London. Interested in audience strategy, arts and culture and health.