Sixteen years ago, the sun set on Web 1.0, and we embarked by the light of our smartphones to 24/7 connectivity, down a road paved with corporate blunders, littered with yesterdayâs top 8 friends, scrubbed n00ds, trashed chiptune tracks, bomb threats, and downy unicorn costumes. Comedic treasures were born and abandoned by parent companies; screaming crowds running through billowing tear gas from police vanished behind defunct video players. Devs dreamed of love, artists of postmodern interfaces, and unknowns of entertainment careers. Netizens injured themselves for stunts, by accident, and on purpose. We submitted to our overlord Mark Zuckerberg and the army of influencers. And so many rubber ducks wailed.
Lots of corporations (mostly Google) have competed with Facebook for the social media colonies, and their attempts arenât missed; but Facebookâs monopoly also beat out the divey-er venues and communal spaces which elevated their members to five minutes of fame and triple platinum albums without sponcon. Their obituaries tell us what we already knowâthat your feed could look a lot more interesting, more avant-garde, joyous, local, intimate, kinky, weird, and hilariousâand yes, scarier and even more hateful than it does nowâthanks to varying degrees of censorship, cross-platform embeds, aesthetic customization, technopanic, and algorithm-free zones. Itâs not to say that without Facebook, the whole internet would be more like a local farmerâs market or a punk venue or an art gallery or comedy club or a Narnia fanfic club, just that those places are harder to find these days.
Friendster (2002-2015)
![Screenshot: October 14, 2010](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/qxvoerc9bwepjskqjkh3.jpg)
Itâs 2003, and the future is a white guy in a wide-collar button-down behind a Honda CR-V of laptops (a Dell, possibly?) in a 250 pixel-wide frame. Thatâs Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, featured in an SF Weekly story by Lessley Anderson. In it, she describes the strange experience of opening your laptop onto the world of social media, and Friendsterâs exciting premise that all people are connected by six degrees of separation:
âYour induction into Friendster starts out innocently enough: You receive an e-mail invitation from a friend. It doesnât cost anything to join, so you give it a whirl. You answer questions about your profession, favorite books, movies, music, and other interests, then upload a digital photo of yourself.
Thumbnail versions of your friendsâ photos appear on your profile page like a collection of trading cards. Clicking on their pictures takes you to their pages, where you can see all of their friends, and so on. Even with only a few friends, you find that â through friends of friends â you suddenly have access to a social network of thousands of people.â
Friendster, which Abrams is believed to have conceived as a dating site, reportedly signed up three million users in its first three months; copycats Myspace, Ringo.com, and Orkut followed.
Friendsterâs conceptual vastness, connecting all people on the internet, could have been its downfall; in attempts to reach even more people, Fakesters like âHomer Simpsonâ and âJesusâ popped up for the sole purpose of amassing friend collections, and friend groups became more and more diluted.
By the New York Timesâs and Abramsâs own account, though, hubris killed Friendster. A group of venture capitalists persuaded Abrams to turn down a $30 million offer from Google and then ran it into the ground with novel features rather than keeping the creaky site functioning smoothly. Pages just didnât load.
Friendster was largely considered dead by 2006. In 2009, it was redesigned and acquired by a Malaysian payments company for a reported $40 million; in 2011, it deleted all of its user profiles and announced a do over as a social gaming platform; in 2015, Friendster announced that it was âtaking a break.â It never returned, and many of its early users reportedly defected to Myspace.
Myspace (2003-present)
![Screenshot: June 10 2004](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/adcufxoo8tn7ygjomtma.jpg)
We outgrew our side-swipe bangs, burned our diaries, and moved into Facebookâs collegial suburbs. But why?
In 2008, two years after reportedly surpassing Google as the most-visited website in the United States, Facebook eclipsed Myspaceâs monthly user count. In 2011, when Myspace announced it was laying off half its staff, the New York Times attributed its decline to âfickle consumers and changing tastesâ; a corporate âculture clashâ; litter of celebrity promotion and pop-up ads; and Facebookâs standardized utilitarian interfaceâmeaning that prefab profiles with names stylings like John Doe versus jdoe1234 were appealing to people. Forbes attributes Facebookâs generic design and its slow expansion through universities (with school email address verifications) and 13+ age policy to a perception that Facebook was a âsafe space,â which would have incidentally coincided with a technopanic created by news reports of pedophilia. Social media scholar danah boyd performed an extensive study finding that racism also played a part, with upper-middle class white users deciding to wall off into exclusive groups.
It is true that Myspace withered after News Corporation bought it for $580 million in 2005. Hefty layoffs followed in 2009 and 2011; it was sold and bought and sold and bought again for a fraction of the price. In 2011, just like Friendster, CEO Mike Jones announced that they would no longer try to rival Facebook in social networking and described their new strategy as a âsocial entertainmentâ site like Huffington Post, whatever that means. In March, the company admitted that theyâd lost practically all of their user data pre-2016. LinkedIn lists 393 current employees at the company, down from 1,300 in 2009.
That is too bad because today thereâs no parallel. Myspace was originally designed so that you could go down a rabbit hole of bandsâ pages, finding who influenced each other from their friends and posts, making it easy for non-coastal local bands to get followings and book shows. Those unknowns certainly arenât coming up on your algorithmically-sorted feed.
Bebo (2005-2013)
![Screenshot: February 28, 2005](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/irzjquy8kdibtfbvr73l.jpg)
Bebo wouldnât be on the list, if not for a stunning bit of maneuvering at the outset of the corporate crusade to blindly colonize social media at any expense. Which made spouses Xochi and Michael Birch wealthy beyond a start-upâs wildest dreams.
In 2008, AOL bought Bebo for $850 million in what Gawker called âthe best social-network cashout to date.â Wired wrote in 2013 that Bebo âwas never, not for one bright shining moment, ever regarded as a leading network,â more a âtool to exploit big clueless corporate suitors.â
Despite its impressive 2005 debut, hitting one million users nine days after its launch, Bebo did indeed fail to distinguish itself; in 2010, AOL sold it to a private equity fund for $10 million; in 2013, Birch bought it back for $1 million and announced a planned relaunch which didnât take off.
Then they donated the leftovers to Myspace Tom in solidarity.
Not really, but they have reportedly given millions to charity:water and shepherded it to philanthropists of Silicon Valley. They made a fancy members-only post-gentrification-New York club in San Francisco which was considered lame. And then the Queen awarded them both OBEs.
OpenSocial (2007-??)
![Screenshot: November 3, 2011](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/xnr59x4ih4jpqh0zlays.jpg)
One of many failed attempts to thwart Facebook, OpenSocial was conceived by an âallianceâ between Google, Myspace, and struggling social networks to combat Facebookâs amassment of games and apps by independent developers. The OpenSocial software presumably would attract more developers with standardized API to distribute apps across all sites.
Itâs still around, but itâs mostly described now in the past tense. Reddit product strategist Jason Costa wrote in 2017 that the various languages across sitesâ containers would have been a headache for developers who had to rewrite their programs for each network; in 2010, Brian Balfour, co-founder of the gaming platform Viximio, wrote for Adweek that the project had fizzled out mainly due to lack of follow-through.
ConnectU (2002-2008)
![Screenshot: January 25, 2005](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/njilbhi56dqloxsckcpv.jpg)
Nobody knows of ConnectU because itâs the Facebook that never was; nobody references it as the misfortunate underdog because itâs not the Facebook we need.
Mark Zuckerbergâs classmates Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused him of stealing their idea for an exclusive Harvard student/alumni dating network âConnectU,â which theyâd thought up in 2002. They alleged that theyâd asked him to finish programming ConnectU, and that instead of delivering as promised, Zuckerberg delayed ConnectU and launched Facebook.
The ConnectU guys went on to try a few more ideas, like ConnectHi for high schoolers and Social Butterfly, a ConnectU feature which would allow you to integrate your connections from outside networks like Facebook. In 2007, at which point Facebook had 31 million users, they sued Facebook for a laundry list of allegations including misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement, and fraud. The complaint argues that ConnectUâs original Harvard-only base of âwell-educated students and alumniâ would have been an âattractive demographic for many advertisers,â which is true, but not exactly heartbreaking.
The Guardian reported in 2009 that Facebook paid up to $65 million in cash and shares. Divya Narendra defends Facebook on TV now, and the Winklevoss brothers are Bitcoin billionaires. Theyâre all on Facebook.
Tribe.net (2003-2008)
![Screenshot: February 19, 2007](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/h7bkidjkksckmzgjofij.jpg)
Imagine a craigslist for burners, and you had tribe.net, a site for both unloading queen-size bed frames and fostering community groups for (mainly) the Bay Area Burning Man crowd and âproud freaksâ called âtribes.â The site, founded by Zynga founder Mark Pincus, doesnât seem to have cracked a million users, but it was a sanctum for worshippers of sailor flesh, wheat-free enthusiasts, and wolven clans for elves who are also wolves.
In 2005, tribe announced that it was barring sexually explicit and offensive content, amidst the Justice Departmentâs crackdown on internet porn, and a reported advertiser scare. A âTerms of Use Guyâ appeared to surveil and report âoffensive content.â With him went the smart girlsâ porn club, and eventually, the users.
In 2006, Pincus blogged that new management, or âa big stupid mastheadâ had commandeered control of the site, that he was reclaiming control and âreturning the tribe to users.â In 2008, while Pincusâs other company Zynga was building an empire of games on Facebook (like FarmVille), he told SF Weekly that he was keeping tribe up because it âserves a really valuable role in the communityââbut the same piece notes that tribeâs homepage was down, and by 2017, tribe announced that it was âworking out optionsâ for a new site host.
Neglect is not good for a social network. In 2018, a reddit conspiracy group with a very elaborate Clinton Foundation theory posted verifiable Wayback Machine screenshots of pedophilic threads from the âsick nâ twistedâ tribe circa 2016, which has stuck, still, to tribe.netâs Google results.
Path (2010-2018)
![Screenshot: July 30, 2011](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/o7nmu0dyaeyqofqwxwlj.jpg)
Now that itâs 2010, your auditorium of Facebook friends includes a guy you met at a bar and various otherâŠacquaintances. This was the impetus for the 50-friends-only mobile app Path, which co-founders David Morin (of Facebook) and Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau (of Napster) based on the findings of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that people can generally have between 40 and 60 close friends and family. (According to the New York Times, Dunbarâs research was âa popular topic of discussionâ amongst social network developers at the time.) In 2012, Path broadened the friend limit to 150, aka âDunbarâs Number,â representing a personâs maximum number of stable relationships. Path called itself a âpersonal network.â
Path was âred-hotâ, reaching 1.5 million downloads in the first three weeks; after three months, the founders reportedly declined a $100 million offer from Google, and by 2013 it was reportedly valued at $500 million. A year after Facebook had just dethroned Myspace, Path was a bonafide Facebook âcompetitor.â
Path lost some of its vibey goodwill in 2012, when it admitted to the then-taboo practice of pulling contacts from usersâ phone books, including those of its early adopters under the age of 13, resulting in an $800,000 FTC fine. In 2014, on the brink of failure, Path increased the friend limit to 500. In 2015, the Korean communications company Daum Kakao bought Path for an undisclosed sum. In 2018, Path shut down.
In 2012, Kirsten Bischoff, co-founder of the micro social network HATCHEDit, warned that Path could easily become another âexcellent tool that was ahead of its time,â unable to compete with Facebookâs exploding user baseâat that point, gaining about 50 million active monthly users per quarter. Six years later, Bischoffâs prediction came true in a eulogy by Gizmodoâs Harrison Weber.
Path had some other good ideas: a text service with a person on the other end who would call your local businesses to answer questions like whether a restaurant has reservations or Home Depot has a part. And you can still experience a small portion of Path today on Facebook, which has a near-identical version of Pathâs âReactions.â
Yik Yak (2013-2017)
![Screenshot: July 15, 2014](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/mgvhc3m1umpii2pjwdab.jpg)
The app for college students that quickly turned into a Black Mirror episode. Yik Yak, the anonymous messaging app designed by frat brothers Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington with campuses in mind, allowed users to broadcast posts within a five-mile radius without creating a username. It soon became a scourge on 1,600 schools, terrorized by Yik Yak-borne threats: bomb threats which led to multiple lockdowns and evacuations, a threat of a âVirginia Tech 2.0,â threats by white students to kill black students, threats to rape and âeuthanizeâ feminist students, and general cruelty and mockery encouraging suicide. Several schools banned it, subpoenas and court orders were issued, federal complaints were filed against schools, and Yik Yak had to disable the app near high schools and middle schools altogether.
Yik Yak briefly dominated the tide of anonymous messaging apps like Whisper, Secret, and Formspring; in September 2014, it peaked the third-most-downloaded iOS app with 1.8 million monthly downloads. By the same time the following year, it had shrunk to 125,000 per month. It finally shut down in 2017.
Ello (2014-present)
![Screenshot: October 8, 2015](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/bevhfue8c0uxcniz7i4o.jpg)
Ello was the Rem Koolhaas building of social media, in all of its elite minimalist beauty. Seven self-described âwell-known artists and designersâ of the studio Berger & Föhr manifested an invite-only anti-Facebook, its bare white walls uncluttered by ads, intended for high-resolution photos and dainty sans-serif text. The boutique network happened to coincide with growing anxiety around Facebookâs invasive ad targeting, and they launched in 2014 with the edict âYou Are Not a Productââalthough the trade-off was that you had to be accepted. Sign-up requests surged a few months later with Facebookâs âreal nameâ policy crackdown and ensuing LGBTQ exodus. At its peak, one Ello co-founder reported that they were getting 34,000 invite requests per hour.
So many people wanted to join that Ello frequently had to put requests on hold to handle the volume, and it was buggy. Thatâs not surprising, since Ello was still in beta mode and manned by a team of designers who werenât collecting ad revenue or subscription fees as it was going viral. At the time, UX product designer Bona Kim wrote that broken functions, a squirrelly style sheet, incompatibility with mobile, and unclear hierarchy of information at the expense aesthetic âsimplicityâ made it maddeningly unusable.
Fair enough â from the beginning, Ello said that they never intended to be a Facebook replacement.
Theyâve since redesigned to with a more accessible aesthetic which reads like a fashion brand. You can sign up without an invite now, though.
Orkut (2004-2014)
![Screenshot: February 5, 2004](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/em5k7saqllalteqtge4c.jpg)
Google tried and tried and tried and tried and tried, but it canât get a social network going. After it attempted to buy Friendster for $30 million, Google launched Orkut, shortly after Myspace and just before Facebook. And like so many social media founders, Orkutâs eponymous Google software engineer Orkut BĂŒyĂŒkkökten seems to have dreamed it up as a dating site, or, describing it to the New Yorker in 2004: âa good matrix for romance.â Since I was never on the site, I defer to the New Yorkerâs description:
âNew Orkut members fill out pastel-blue forms: favorite TV shows, career skills, perfect first date, bedroom contents. They upload photographs of themselves in alluring or alarming poses. They find âCommunitiesâ to join: Photography (3,449 members), Belgian Beer (114 members), Kosher Roommates (âfor coping or recovering roommates of Kosher adherentsâ; 3 members). If the right Community doesnât exist, theyâre free to found a new one. They can rate their friends, relying on an ancient system of hieroglyphsâsmiley faces, ice cubes, and hearts, which stand, respectively, for trustworthiness, coolness, and sexiness.â
See Orkutâs 2004 homepage here.
Over the next decade, Orkut never took off in the US but was huge in Brazil and India, at one point, claiming 27 million members to Facebookâs 4.2 million. Orkut ostensibly fulfilled the same basic needs, but observers/analysts/users attributed Facebookâs dominance to a number of factors: Facebook had more games, the feed, the like button or notifications, a more âprofessionalâ look, mutual friends , and cultivated a following of international students and âprofessionalsâ who brought Facebook back to India.
In 2011, Facebook reportedly surpassed Orkut in Brazil. In his farewell post, BĂŒyĂŒkkökten wrote that Orkut had âa community of 300 million membersâ and invited them to move to his new network, âhello.â
As for GoogleâŠ
Google+ (2011-2019)
![Screenshot: August 14, 2014](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/fbr1psntsvio0a4rzocm.jpg)
Googleâs next stab was a dreary jumble of boxes evoking a digital fulfillment center. By all accounts, it was an attempt to integrate features that Facebook, LinkedIn, and the iPhone have cornered (like location sharing and automatic cloud storage for photos), butâwith dropdown menus organizing your people into âfriends,â âfamily,â and âacquaintances,â further catalogued into the even more confusing âcirclesââit felt like an unimaginative robotâs idea of socializing. Or, as Google+ UI designer Morgan Knutson called it in a postmortem tweetstorm, a âgod forsaken piece of shit.â
In a lengthy thread, Morgan described siloed teams under corporate bureaucracy which conceptualized networking as âthe social graphâ:
âVic [Gundotraâs] product vision was fear-based. âGoogle built the knowledge graph, and Facebook swooped in and built the social graph. If we donât own the social graph then we canât claim to have indexed ALL the worldâs data.ââ
Plus, it was more overtly unsettling than Facebook in the same way that your gmail avatar started popping up in the upper right hand corner of YouTube and your Chrome browser. Thatâs because, as the New York Times reported in 2014 (even then, calling it a âghost townâ), Google Plus was basically an attempt to collect a central dataset for all of the stuff you were doing across all Google services; at one point, you couldnât set up a gmail account or comment on YouTube without setting up Google Plus. In the words of Google Plus project management VP Bradley Horowitz, it âgives Google that common understanding of who you are.â
On October 8th, 2018, the same day the Wall Street Journal reported that Google Plus had exposed hundreds of thousands of user data for years, Google announced that it would shut down the service in August due to âlow usage and engagement.â Additional data was exposed from 5.2 million accounts during a November software update, and Google started deleting profiles in April.
Maybe this time??
Vine (2012-2016)
![Screenshot: September 30, 2014](https://cdn.statically.io/img/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2019/08/azajqdn0oaa333pfg9mg.jpg)
The video-sharing app Vine was less of a social network and more of a microblogging platform like its owner, Twitter, but for a while, Vine dominated the internetâs imagination, and its links populated all networks. The six-second loop format generated a new medium for comedy and activism, most memorably, for work by creators of color.
In 2015, writing about the full-blown cultural universe created by black Viners, journalist Hannah Giorgis observed that the Twitter-embeddable fast-paced loops meant you saw a lot more people, faster, in a rhythmic format conducive to âpercussive precisionâ thatâs lost in longer YouTube vlogs. âAnd six seconds isnât necessarily enough time to give backstory, to explain your punch line (or yourself) to viewers who donât already have the context they need to understand,â she added.
That description goes as much for a cultural sensation started with a child ballerina dancing to âdo it for the vine!â as it does for Jus Reignâs parody questions about his turban, backwards handsprings through a Krispy Kreme, and singing on a counter at WalMart.
The speed and ease of posting six-second clips, before the invention of Periscope and Instagram video, also made it a critical tool for activists. Protests erupted around the country after St. Louis city alderman Antonio French posted police surrounding Michael Brownâs body on Vine; the subsequent nationwide uprising was Vined and compiled into an all-Vine documentary. The 2013 bombing outside the U.S. Embassy in Turkey, anti-refugee hostility in Europe, the enormity of the Umbrella Movement, and 2013 protests in Brazilâall Vined.
And a potato flew around a room, the Apple Store woman yelled, and artists created art. Logan Paul was also there.
Then Vine shut down. Generally journalists gleaned that it just couldnât compete with all the other similar video services; Vineâs owner Twitter had just undergone a round of layoffs, and Facebook and Instagram were just unrolling video functions. A former executive told the Verge that âInstagram video was the beginning of the end.â Vine gave users advance notice and tools to download their stuff, but it left a generation of stories riddled with dead links.
Update: We changed the archival screenshot of path.com to one that better reflects the iteration of the site at the time the app launched.