There’s a wall that separates generations, and it’s not the Berlin Wall – it’s friendship with Tom.
The social networks that vanished
Remember Friendster? LiveJournal? Flickr? And most importantly – were you on MySpace? Let’s go back to a time when social networks came and went in a flash, influencers didn’t exist, and, more importantly – we still had fun.
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- Alessandro Scarano
- 26 November 2024
If you’re wondering, “Who’s Tom?” you probably weren’t on MySpace – the first true social network. Back in 2006, MySpace was the most-visited site in the U.S., even beating Google and Yahoo, a ‘90s internet icon later eclipsed by the “Big G.”
Tom was everyone’s first friend on MySpace – a mythological figure of the early internet who showed up by default in every new user’s friends list. His profile had a bio that featured a winking emoticon: ;-). If you’re wondering what “emoticons” were, they were emoji before there were emoji – character-based faces typed directly from your keyboard. Among the most iconic were the classic smiley :-), the “just deal with it” (••), and the iconic shrug ¯\(ツ)/¯.
Tom was Tom Anderson, one of MySpace’s co-founders. Somehow, Tom managed to become an exception – besides being as unavoidable as that time Apple snuck a U2 album onto everyone’s iTunes, he was the only real person among a crowd of fictional names. The first name + last name combination was practically banned. The platform’s most famous figure was Tila Tequila – and “Tequila” was surprisingly not her real last name.
Back then – which feels like both yesterday and a thousand years ago – the internet was a far cry from today’s “digital twin” of reality. Apart from basic work functions (like email and a few news sites), the WWW (there were no apps!) was an imaginative space where we could lead a “second life” with people who often lived far away. It was exclusive, not a global directory like today. Connections were slow, very few people had phones with internet access, and if you had one, it was mainly for checking email – not for goofing off. Data was expensive, and there was no sleek, intuitive iPhone 16.
Being on social media was rare. At its peak, MySpace had around 75 million users, a fraction of the nearly 3 billion on Facebook last year. Yet in this fast-changing landscape, social networks rose and fell with ease. People hopped from one profile to another, logging in and out almost like changing identities. It was a digital playground for the few, and it was fun – a seeming anarchy where, meanwhile, some were making big money. When Facebook launched, people questioned its longevity. And yet, it’s still here – though maybe a little less fun.
In the meantime, we’ve buried many social networks: LiveJournal, Fotolog, Friendster, Flickr, even MySpace itself. Some still exist, at least in name, but they’ve morphed into something else and their golden age has long passed. Among the many reasons for this decline is the normalization of digital life, as well as the shift from grassroots, community-led platforms to structured hierarchies, complete with celebrity influencers – a defining feature of the past decade.
But arguably, it was the smartphone boom that marked the true Year Zero of social media. Paradoxically, as people started connecting 24/7, social media platforms began to converge. For the past decade, Zuckerberg’s Facebook (now Meta) has dominated, swallowing Instagram and WhatsApp along the way. A few rivals have popped up, like Snapchat and the wildly popular TikTok, which could face a potential U.S. ban. Will they, too, join this list of forgotten platforms one day?
One thing is certain: twenty years ago, no one considered “social media detox” a thing. Now, it’s a common discussion, especially for those who need to use social platforms for work. Books like Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Andrew Marantz’s Antisocial, Anna Wiener’s The Uncanny Valley, and even earlier, the film The Social Network by Fincher and Sorkin, along with Netflix’s The Social Dilemma, have shattered any naive illusions we might have held about our online presence and the companies behind it. The “dumb phone” – a basic, non-smartphone – is nearly an urban legend. Yet, like flies to honey, we can’t seem to leave social media alone.
Opening image: an old account on MySpace, with the picture of Tom as friend
Being first doesn’t always help. Founded by Jonathan Abrams in 2002, Friendster was a proto-Facebook. Its patents were barely a decade old before they were sold off to Zuckerberg’s company, netting Abrams a few million dollars. Friendster then tried to reinvent itself as a social gaming platform with over 100 million subscribers before closing in 2018.
Fortnite may be a video game, but it’s also a social platform. World of Warcraft (WoW) set the standard for online role-playing games with social features like messaging, content sharing, and even a marketplace. By 2010, it had 12 million users and was arguably more effective than a dating app, creating countless “WoW IRL couples.” While WoW has lost some of its golden-age player base, it’s still around.
Is it better to connect with only a select few people? Path emerged in 2010 as an alternative to Facebook and Twitter, limiting users to 150 contacts. It didn’t last.
A straightforward platform where you could upload one photo a day, Fotolog was quirky and low-quality – but fast and fun. It was also the first to show that a single image can say more than a lot of words. And it was perfect as a dating app before they existed.
Early internet social media was defined by blogs – websites anyone could use to “post” their thoughts. Some became wildly popular and even evolved into news outlets! LiveJournal was one of the first platforms to try combining a blogging system with a social network. It remains a nostalgic favorite for many.
A photo-sharing community before smartphones. Back when images were viewed horizontally on computer screens, Flickr made people realize that their media could be worth something. It was a haven for early citizen journalism until it was bought by Yahoo – and later sank with Yahoo. Enjoy Instagram.
This was something else entirely: a 3D platform where imagination ruled. In many ways, Second Life was a precursor to the metaverse, with the only difference being that it actually existed, while the metaverse still waits in the wings. It may seem like Internet prehistory now, but it held immense potential – even Barack Obama used it in his presidential campaign.
Before meta-platforms like WhatsApp or Instagram’s DMs, ICQ (“I seek you”) brought people together over dial-up connections. It peaked in the early 2000s with about 100 million users.
An all-Italian network, Duepuntozero is a throwback for “old millennials” who used it from 2004 to 2009. Among its followers was a young Chiara Ferragni. Though it became a sea of emo boys with bowl cuts and young women flaunting Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton, it was more than just a photo gallery. Long dead now, it’s a classic of Italian internet history.
Google entered the social media scene too, though its track record is full of projects that fizzle (except for hits like Docs, Gmail, Chrome, and Android). Launched in 2011, Google+ was shut down before the end of the decade.
Not really a social network per se, Bang with Friends introduced “friends with benefits” into the sanitized realm of U.S. social platforms. It let users indicate which Facebook friends they’d be “down” to hook up with. If the feeling was mutual, the app notified both parties. Later rebranded as Down to tone things down, it was soon shut down – party over.
Once upon a time, there was Twitter, the social network where short text messages were "tweeted". At first, people didn’t really know what to make of it. Then it became a reference for entertainment, politics, business, and journalism: news was shared on Twitter. When it went into crisis, it was bought by Elon Musk, who transformed it into X. But it seems that the situation has only worsened, especially due to Musk's preminent role in the 2024 U.S. elections.
We’ve grown so bored with social media that we’re eagerly waiting for the next big thing. We pinned our hopes on Clubhouse, the all-audio social network, and on BeReal, which asked users to post as soon as they received a notification (low-pressure). Both saw a spike in users but eventually experienced a significant drop-off. Something similar happened with Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter. It had an explosive start, with over 100 million sign-ups in its first five days, but interaction quickly dwindled. Today, however, the platform is doing reasonably well, boasting over 270 million daily active users.