7 items
The social network that beat MySpace in Britain, sold to AOL for $850 million at the top, and got bought back by its own founders for $1 million five years later. America barely noticed Bebo; for a few years the UK and Ireland barely used anything else.
Before Instagram, before TikTok, there was DeviantArt — launched in August 2000 as a software-skinning offshoot and grown into the gallery where every teenager who'd ever held a stylus posted their first drawing and got their first comment. Anime, fan art, original characters, wallpapers — the site called submissions "deviations," and being different was the point.
Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from a Harvard dorm in 2004, and it spread to college campuses like a virus — exclusive, intimate, and gated behind a .edu email address. By 2006, when it opened to anyone with an email address, the velvet rope had fallen and the era was over.
The social network you joined before you even knew what a social network was. Millions made their first-ever online "profile" on Friendster — then MySpace came along, and the site that started it all became the cautionary tale.
MySpace launched in August 2003 and became the social network that swallowed the mid-2000s internet — where everyone's first friend was Tom. Top 8 rankings sparked drama, profile songs played on auto-load, and DIY HTML customization meant glitter graphics and autoplay music ruled. Bands broke careers there; it was the most-visited website in the US by 2006.
Google's first social network — named after the engineer who built it — where you left "scraps" on friends' pages, rated them Trustworthy, Cool, or Sexy, and joined communities for everything. A modest curiosity in America, it became a full-blown national obsession in Brazil and India.
The image host that decorated the entire early internet — MySpace profiles, forum signatures, eBay listings. Photobucket's ten billion images were invisible infrastructure, right up until June 2017, when a paywall turned millions of embedded pictures into upgrade-nag placeholders all at once.