An online diary site invented the comment box and friends-only posts
Two features now baked into every social network, the reader comment and posts visible only to friends, were first dreamed up by Open Diary, a late-1990s community of people keeping journals online. It launched in 1998, six years before Facebook, which would eventually become the biggest social network on Earth.
Gathering to swap news, say in a village market, is as old as towns. Computer versions appeared early, on systems such as Usenet, ARPANET and bulletin boards, and later on services like CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online. The first web communities, GeoCities in 1994 and Theglobe.com and Tripod.com in 1995, handed users free space and simple tools to publish personal pages, while Classmates.com linked people through their email addresses.
By the late 1990s the user profile and its list of friends had become the centrepiece. SixDegrees arrived in 1997, followed by Mixi, Cyworld, Friendster and others; Cyworld was one of the first companies to make money selling virtual goods. MySpace and LinkedIn launched in 2003, and by 2005 MySpace drew more page views than Google. Orkut caught on first in Brazil, although most of its earliest members were American, and then spread fast in India. Facebook, launched in 2004, overtook them all to become the largest network in 2009, and by 2017 it had 2.13 billion monthly active users. The phrase social media itself dates from 2004.
Services differ in who may contact whom. Some let any member message any other; LinkedIn, built around careers, generally expects you to know someone in real life before reaching out. Others serve mainly to find information, such as Goodreads for books or Reddit. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the video platform Zoom became central to school, work and government meetings.
Uptake has been vast. A 2013 survey found 73 per cent of American adults on such sites, and India saw the world's fastest growth in users that year. In a 2015 study, 63 per cent of American Facebook and Twitter users called those networks their main source of news, and 85 per cent of 18 to 34 year olds used social sites when deciding what to buy.
Source: Social networking service
