We all know about social media now. But most of us have completely forgotten about the sites that paved the way for Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and all of the other countless social media sites we know and love. We hear names like GeoCities and LiveJournal spoken between friends from a different generation and the 10 year age gap suddenly seems like 100. While we remember when "Gangnam Style" became the most viewed video on YouTube, they remember when OhNoTheyDidn't broke their own LiveJournal page after receiving over 16,000,000 comments on one post.
Does this sound a bit archaic to you? Well, surprisingly enough that occurred only 7 years ago in January 2009. The first widely recognized example of social media was even farther back with the website Classmates, founded in December 1995. Classmates allowed users to create profiles, search a large database of yearbooks, and add friends from high school. And two years later another major one popped up called Six Degrees which included many of Classmates' popular features. On it, users could also create profiles, add friends, and include school affiliations. Six Degrees had so many registered users that, at the time, the Internet couldn't even support its traffic.
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One of the biggest original social media sites, though, was Friendster which allowed users to create profiles and connect with people they knew in real life online. Sound familiar? In the midst of its popularity, many similar websites arose. One of these was a site that we are all quite familiar with now. When Facebook was just starting up, Friendster was in the height of its popularity, but that didn't last long. As Facebook became more popular, Friendster began to lose its following. It underwent an unpopular redesign in 2009 before it was turned into a gaming site in 2011. However, it was eventually taken down altogether in June 2014.
Facebook was established in January 2004 and was an instant success. It was created as a way to connect creator Mark Zuckerberg's college campus online. However, it soon spread much farther. By the end of 2004, Facebook had over one million registered users and had received a private investment of $500,00 from the founder of PayPal. It gained popularity steadily for many years and by 2016 it had gained over 1.5 billion users.
And the rest is history.
Just as Facebook's way was paved by sites like Friendster and SixDegrees, others followed suit. GeoCities was soon ignored in favor of LiveJournal which was eventually replaced by Tumblr. So as our worlds continue to revolve around our Snapchat streaks and retweets, you have to wonder how long this will last. What will be the next great name in social media? And how long will it take before we are the old and distant generation reminiscing about Instagram and YouTube?
