Today, when you want to connect with a friend, family member, colleague, or even a customer, it’s as simple as opening an app or sending a quick message, thanks to social network platforms.
But imagine a time when connecting meant writing a letter by hand, waiting days for a response, or scheduling face-to-face meetings to stay updated.
Let’s take a journey back to those days and explore the fascinating history of social media—how it started, all the milestones along the way, and how it’s transformed into the vibrant, digital world we know today.
Social media's history dates back to early electronic communication in the 1960s and bulletin boards in the late 1970s. It progressed in the 90s with platforms like Classmates.com and SixDegrees.com, paving the way for MySpace and Facebook. Since then, innovations in apps and smartphones have led to today's visually engaging platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Social media refers to technologies that enable users to share ideas and information.
Merriam-Webster defines social media as “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos.)”
Similarly, the Cambridge English dictionary offers a similar definition: “websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information, opinions, pictures, videos, etc. on the internet, especially social networking websites.”
With a shared understanding of social media, let’s examine the earliest forms of online communication and their influence on the world of social media as we know it today.
Many people link the history of social media to the first social networking platforms. To understand its history, we must return to the first forms of online communication.
Pre-internet online communication dates back to the 1960s. During the Cold War between the United States (U.S.) and the Soviet Union, the United States Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) designed ARPANET to create a decentralized communication system to facilitate communication between research institutions and military installations.
ARPANET is known as the first operational packet-switching network. In packet-switching, data or information is divided into small packets and sent separately across the network, allowing computers to send and receive multiple packets simultaneously. ARPANET was the precursor to the modern internet and was instrumental in the influence of today’s online communication and social networking technologies.
Following the creation of ARPANET, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess created the first BBS, the computerized bulletin board system (CBBS), in 1978.
CBBS was the first non-military computer-based community that allowed users to share information. They were essentially electronic versions of physical bulletin boards you might see in workplaces, coffee shops, gyms, and other public locations.
Source: PCMag
The foundation of the internet, online communities, and the ability to exchange communication saw the first social networking platforms appear in the late 1990s.
Depending on who you talk to, SixDegrees.com is considered the first social networking platform; however, classmates.com is worth mentioning as part of the social media evolution.
Randy Conrads started classmates.com in 1995 — a new website on the internet to reconnect with people he went to school with. Conrads incorporated features like member profiles and friends lists on a subscription model.
Today, on classmates.com, users can sign up and create profiles to reconnect with long-lost high school friends, browse digital yearbooks, and organize or find out information about upcoming reunions.
In 1996, an attorney named Andrew Weinreich and a group of friends began designing SixDegrees.com. After brainstorming and developing the network platform, Weinreich launched SixDegrees.com in 1997. Unsurprisingly, SixDegrees.com originated from the six degrees of separation theory proposed by writer Frigyes Karinthy in 1929.
A BBC interview with Weinreich features a recording of him describing the site in which he says, “I’d like to start by talking to you about a theory called Six Degrees. It says that every person on this planet is connected to every other person through no more than six relationships.”
Weinreich aspired to create a platform where everyone could index their relationships online and identify their connections through others. On SixDegrees.com, users could create profiles, send messages, and post bulletin board items to people in their first-, second-, and third-degree connections.
Source: BBC News
AIM was a pioneer in online communication, specifically instant messaging. AOL launched AIM in May 1997 as a stand-alone application, enabling anyone with an internet connection to chat and communicate with others in real time.
Users create profiles with AIM Screen Names (or usernames that allow them to distinguish themselves). The tool’s most distinctive feature was the “Buddy List,” which displayed a user’s friends and their online status so they could quickly see who was available to chat. AIM also offered chat rooms for public and private group conversations.
AIM left a significant mark on today’s online communication norms and language by introducing features like online status, profiles, and group messaging that are standard in many social media platforms today.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Services like AIM declined as social media platforms surged in the early 2000s. Below is a history of the century's most influential early social media networks.
In 2002, a Canadian computer programmer named Jonathan Abrams founded the social networking site Friendster. Friendster was a service for connecting with contacts, dating, and discovering events. It launched in 2003 and quickly attracted millions of members.
In 2011, Friendster relaunched as a social gaming platform before the platform’s eventual shutdown in 2015, followed by the company's shutdown later in 2018.
Chris DeWolfe, Tom Anderson, and Jon Hart launched MySpace in 2003, the first social network with a global audience. MySpace allowed users to customize their profile pages with unique backgrounds, designed page cursors, music players, and other HTML code.
People used it to keep in touch with friends, showcase their “best friends” via a top eight friends list, and find potential romantic partners. It was an instant hit until Facebook came along shortly after.
Source: The Atlantic
Former MySpace users likely recognize co-founder and “former first friend on MySpace,” Tom Anderson. Today, he occasionally shares life updates on Instagram.
Reid Hoffman and his co-founders Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, and Jean-Luc Vaillant officially launched LinkedIn in 2003. It is a professional social networking site with over one billion members in 200 countries.
Working professionals and job seekers use LinkedIn to grow their networks and search for new positions. Businesses use it to increase brand awareness, identify new talent, and share insights about their company culture.
LinkedIn introduced features like endorsements, recommendations, and job boards (similar to previous bulletin boards) to enhance its functionality and user value. It varies from other platforms because it’s designed for professional networking, so people often connect over shared work-related interests and goals compared to more personal ones.
Harvard University students, including the well-known Mark Zuckerberg, founded Facebook in 2004. Alongside Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook, originally known as “TheFacebook.”
They limited the original site to Harvard students to connect students across the university, similar to an online student directory with photos and basic information about the students. Over time, Facebook expanded its service to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale and gradually spread throughout the United States and Canada. Facebook became accessible to the general public in 2006 and quickly saw rapid growth in the years to come, even becoming the most downloaded app of the 2010s.
Today, individuals use it to connect with friends and loved ones, but it also boasts business features, including the ability to advertise and create company pages.
YouTube is the most recognized video-sharing social networking site that allows users to build communities through video content. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube in 2005, and today, the platform is home to user-generated videos and professional productions across any topic.
YouTube has significantly influenced video and entertainment content and paved the way for becoming a social networking site and a major platform for educational information and marketing content.
Source: Business Insider
Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams founded Twitter in 2006. They created it for microblogging, providing users a platform to post short updates. It became famous for its real-time information sharing as many people turned to it for news updates, sharing opinions, and obtaining live information on current events around the globe.
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Further into the 2010s, social media platforms evolved with an emphasis on visual content sharing, real-time interaction, and video virality.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram in 2010. The platform became known for its square 1:1 photo and video-sharing capabilities. Early users might recall the pre-loaded photo filter options for enhancing images. Due to its simplicity and focus on visual content, the platform quickly grew in popularity. Today, it’s a significant player in social media, particularly in influencer marketing.
Another visual content-focused platform, Pinterest, was founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp. Pinterest allows users to create and share collections of visual content and images, called “pins,” organized on boards similar to a physical bulletin board. It became known as a go-to source for hobby and crafting inspiration as it allows users to explore and save ideas visually for quick reference.
Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown launched the photo and video messaging app Snapchat in 2011. It introduced shareable images and videos that expire upon viewing them. Snapchat has attracted a young audience, encouraging connection via spontaneous and candid communication. The platform continues experimenting with new technological features, like augmented reality lenses, and other platforms like Facebook and Instagram have adopted the content functionality for which Snapchat is most well-known.
Formed by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, TikTok launched in 2016 and has become one of the world’s most popular social media platforms. Users upload short-form videos, many of which are set to music and edited using a range of features inside the app.
TikTok surfaces personalized video recommendations, creating user-centric experiences that encourage users to stick around and scroll through the app for extensive periods. Despite facing some privacy challenges, TikTok continues to dominate short-form video.
Source: TikTok
The social media timeline below summarizes the evolution of social media from the 90s.
Source: Broadband Search
The way we interact with one another via social networking sites online will change as technology advances. Influences like artificial intelligence (AI), mental health ramifications, and privacy concerns will impact the future of social media.
The rise of AI and automation will continue to influence social media in 2025 and beyond. According to Sprinklr, AI-powered content creation (i.e., text, images, and videos) will become more popular and influence social media.
The growing awareness of the impact of social media on mental health will impact future platform development. Recently, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for warning labels on social media platforms due to their effects on kids and young people.
As privacy concerns grow, social media platforms may adopt stricter data protection measures as platform providers emphasize an ongoing commitment to user privacy and security.
From early online communication mechanisms to instant messaging and user profile-based communities to visual content, the only constant in social media is how much it evolves.
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