Rise of social media

First launches of social media

Six degrees

It is believed that the very first social media site was Six Degrees, founded by Andrew Weinreich in May 1997. It had simple, but useful features such as: friends lists and profiles. It was sold in December 2000 to Youth Stream Media Networks. Unfortunately, it was shut down one year later in 2001.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal was one of the first blogging platforms. It was founded by Brad Fitzpatrick in April, 1999. Originally, it was designed to keep Brad in touch with his friends, but it grew into a place, where everyone could share their thoughts. It was sold in 2005 to Six Apart, and then in 2007 it was sold to SUP Media. It became one of Russia’s social media platforms.

Blogger

Coincidentally, only two months later, after LiveJournal's birth, Blogger was created in August, 1999 by Evan Williams from Pyra Labs. Although, it was designed as a commercial project. Google purchased Blogger and made it free. Many believe that blogging as we know it today, became so popular, because of Google made Blogger available to everyone. It is still popular service for blogging.

Dodgeball

Dodgeball was a mobile designed geolocation-based app. It was founded by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert in 2000. Users could share their activities and statuses through a world map to their friends. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005 and shut down in 2009.

Ryze

Ryze was a premise of LinkedIn. It was founded by Adrian Scott in October 2001. Its target audience was business professionals. Ryze also had a simple list of features: profiles, messages, and friend lists. Currently, it still running.

Friendster

What Six Degrees lacked Friendster had. Friendster was a social media platform that showed how people were connected. It helped in melting the ice between strangers. Friendster was founded by Jonathan Abrams and Peter Chin in March 2002. Due to technical issues that emerged from the enormous popularity of the service, many users migrated from Friendster to its rival MySpace. It was sold to a Malaysian Internet Company in 2009. In 2011, the aim of Friendster changed from being a social media site to an online gaming site. Friendster was shut down in 2015.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was founded in 2002, by Reid Hoffman, Konstantin Guericke, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant and Eric Ly. However, LinkedIn was launched on May 5, 2003. Originally, it was a possibility to store and share your resume, but eventually it grew into if not the most, then at least one of the most popular hiring platforms with many useful features. The turning point was in 2011, when LinkedIn went public and everyone could find a job or hire a worker. In 2016 Microsoft bought LinkedIn.

MySpace

MySpace was founded by Brad Greenspan, Josh Berman, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe in August 2003. It had customizable profiles, music bands, messages, forum, events. Overall, a compilation of all gripping features. In 2005, MySpace was sold to News Corporation for 580 million dollars. MySpace was the most popular social media service in 2006. In 2008, Facebook shifted MySpace from the top. When all re-design choices News Corporation made were unsuccessful, MySpace was sold to Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake in 2016.

Orkut

After an unsuccessful Friendster acquiring attempt, Google decided to make its social media site called Orkut. It was founded in January 2004 by Orkut Büyükkökten. Originally, the service could be accessed only by invitation. According to Marissa Mayer, Orkut could not handle the rapidly growing flow of new users and most of their userbase migrated to MySpace. Although, Orkut remain popular in Brazil and India, until it was closed in 2014.

Bebo

Bebo was oriented at young users with highly customizable profiles, modern-widget-style, setting the account either to public or private, and the possibility to link to other social media services. It was founded in July 2005, by Michael Birch and his wife Xochi Birch. Bebo even overtook MySpace with its popularity. It was sold to AOL in 2010. They found it harder and harder to maintain the same level as other new and existing social media set, and eventually, AOL decided to sell it to Criterion Capital Partners in 2010. They redesigned the whole service, but nothing could help keep users logging on. Ironically, Bebo was sold to its founders, Michael Birch and Xochi Birch. They tried to resurrect it, but after another failure they sold Bebo to Amazon. It was the fourth and at the current time last attempt to resurrect service, but it was also a failure. Bebo could be given a title of the unluckiest social media site.

YouTube

Currently, YouTube is one of the most popular social media services and the second most popular search engine. It was founded in February 2005 by Steve Chen, Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. The concept of the service was to share funny home videos. YouTube gained enormous popularity. Concept, has proved to be very successful, but the lack of hardware equipment and constantly uploaded copyrighted materials made its founders sell YouTube in November 2006 to Google.

Odnoklassniki

Odnoklassniki stands for classmates. It is a Russian oriented social media service. It was founded in March 2006, by Albert Popkov. Odnoklassniki was the premise for Vkontakte. It was the second most popular social media in Russian speaking community. However, its userbase is slowly decreasing, due to its old design. The userbase mostly consists of old people, who does not want to switch to something more modern.

Vkontakte

Vkontakte stands for be in touch. Vkontakte had more specific and diverse features than Odnoklassniki. It made Vkontakte the most popular social media in Russian speaking community. It was founded in October 2006 by Pavel Durov. It has all the attributes of any social media platform: messages, share and tag images, video, music, groups, etc. In 2021 Vkontakte was sold to Mailru.