With daily life and social media platforms being inseparable in the modern age, it’s easy to forget that a lot of the household names in the social media space today got their start in the last few decades.
As International Internet Day rolls around this Thursday (Oct 29), marking the early beginnings of what eventually became the World Wide Web that people know today, perhaps it’s a good time to remember some of the iconic platforms that were once part and parcel of the digital world.
The before times
The Internet’s story began in the 1950s, when computers were the size of an entire room, and the idea of a nuclear strike seemed a distinct possibility amid the ongoing Cold War.
According to the United Kingdom’s National Science and Media Museum, these massive and expensive computers were accessible only through the military or universities. This meant there needed to be a way to share access to this computing power, regardless of how far away a user was.
Looking to fill this need, the United States government brought together scientists and engineers at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), with the idea of a “distributed network” at its centre.
A “distributed network” refers to the idea that even if a single point in the network went down or was destroyed, it would continue to work as intended. Such a structure meant that even in the event of an attack at one point, military assets would remain functional and accessible.
This led to the eventual birth of the ARPA Network in 1969, which was then used to send a message through the network from the University of California, Los Angeles to Stanford Research Institute for the very first time. The full message would have read “login”, though the system only managed to send “lo” before it crashed.
In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, then working at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), proposed the World Wide Web: a system that would allow information to be linked and accessed through webpages and browsers. The World Wide Web was originally intended to make it easier for researchers and institutions to share and access information across computer networks.
The 1990s then saw the rise of the precursor of the social media websites available online today: Geocities (1994), initially known as Beverly Hills Internet.
Despite it being classed as a hosting service rather than a social media platform, Geocities allowed users to create and maintain personal websites on any subject, be it fanpages for music and movies, their hobbies and interests, or even about themselves.
Each personal website could be fully customised by users using HTML (HyperText Markup Language), with funky fonts, background music that autoplayed when a page was opened, and animations.
These webpages could then be organised into “cities” and “neighbourhoods”, where content would be grouped based on common themes.
It was eventually shut down in 2009, having lived through most of the 2000s and hosting 38 million pages.
Social media era
When it comes to platforms that were actually classified as social media, the 1990s saw the birth of several familiar, and not-so-familiar, names in the space.
Among them were Classmates.com (1995), centred on existing connections from things like high school and college, and SixDegrees.com (1997), which bore a clear resemblance to modern social media – complete with profiles, friend lists, and direct messages, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Classmates.com still exists today, but mainly caters to the same narrow niche of users, while SixDegrees.com shut down in 2000.
The year 1999 also saw the launch of LiveJournal, a blogging platform that essentially functioned as an online diary, where users could share their thoughts, document their daily lives and form communities around shared interests.
While it was launched in the US, it was later bought by Rambler Media Group and moved to Russia. The website is still in operation today, with a majority of its users being Russian.
Blogger, another blogging platform, was launched in 1999 and was later purchased by Google in 2003 for an undisclosed amount. At the time, it hosted over one million blogs, with 200,000 of them active.
Rapidly evolving landscape
While the 1990s set the foundation, the 2000s were when social media really started stepping into the mainstream.
First there was Friendster in 2002, which launched as a social media website with many of the features that are now commonplace among platforms today, including a friend list, messaging, and content sharing.
It later pivoted to a social gaming website in 2011, deleting user-generated content such as comments and photos in favour of a collection of browser-based web games.
But by then, it had already fallen behind in user count against competitors like Facebook in the United States, says a Wired report published in 2013, due in part to technical issues and the transition from social media to a gaming platform.
LinkedIn, which launched in 2003, put a career-oriented twist on the idea of social media, allowing users to connect with colleagues and contacts within and outside their own industries.
It later launched LinkedIn Jobs in 2005, allowing employers to post vacancies and users to browse job listings and apply for positions through the platform.
MySpace also debuted in 2003 and became known for being a music-centric platform, drawing artists and their fans. This was due to users being able to upload music directly to profiles, which could then be played by visitors.
Like Geocities, MySpace profiles could be customised using HTML code and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), allowing users to personalise everything from fonts and background colours to page layouts.
Then came Facebook in 2004 (originally named TheFacebook). While initially only allowing students at Harvard College, it then grew to encompass other universities and eventually the wider public in 2006.
The company would later acquire photography-centred social media app Instagram in 2012, and subsequently the messaging app WhatsApp in 2014.
Another familiar name to emerge in the 2000s was Twitter, now known as X. Unlike the previous platforms that had a larger focus on connecting with friends and sharing photos, Twitter was more a platform for short, text-based posts.
At launch, each post was limited to just 140 characters – a format known as microblogging.
Social scrolling
The 2010s brought with them a new form of social media, one that is dominated by short-form video content.
Vine was one of the earliest mainstream platforms based on that format when it launched in 2013, limiting users to just six-second clips that looped infinitely.
According to one of its co-founders, Dom Hofmann, in a 2013 interview with The Guardian, smartphones at the time worked well as video cameras, but were not used much due to the work involved with getting footage off smartphones and editing.
“We needed to have a technique that was really easy to do, otherwise people wouldn’t be able to tell their story,” he says.
Hofmann added in the interview that the six-second limit was not a random choice, but instead came after experiments with a range of time limits.
He also said that the short time frame made it easier for users to be creative to fit their content within those limitations.
Under a year since its launch, Vine had already gained over 40 million users. However, just a few years later in 2017, the service was shuttered due to creators leaving for other platforms and dwindling users, according to a 2023 Washington Post report.
This, however, was not the end of the format. Instagram at the time launched a video feature shortly after Vine’s release in 2013, limiting videos to 15-second-long clips, which eventually morphed into the Instagram Reels that users know today.
Another short-form video platform to come out around this time was Musical.ly, which launched in 2014. The app allowed users to create videos between 15 seconds and one minute long, typically lip-syncing or dancing to popular songs, with the added bonus of being able to add filters and visual effects.
It was later acquired by ByteDance in 2017, and the service was merged into TikTok in 2018. Speaking of TikTok, the platform similarly focused on short-form videos initially, with a 15-second limit at launch.
This was gradually increased over the years, with TikTok eventually testing videos of up to 60 minutes in 2024.
These days, other platforms offer a similar scroll-based vertical video format.
