By: Calla Fragassi and Mackenzie Malek

Social media has become a huge part of everyone’s current life since the beginning of the 2000s. It is a way to connect and contact people all over the world through the power of the internet. The effects of social media is a debatable topic, but today we will talk about how it has evolved over the past 20+ years.

1997- Six Degrees

One of the very first social media platforms was released in the late 90s. Six Degrees was made to allow people to connect with friends and family by creating accounts attached to their personal emails. The name Six Degrees comes from the “six degrees of separation” theory that says that everybody is somehow connected by no more than six degrees. The number of users on this platform reached around 3.5 million people over its 4-year running period. The company was eventually bought for $125 million by YouthStream Media Networks, and was shut down in 2001.

2002- Friendster

After Six Degrees was no longer operating, a new site called Friendster rose to take its spot. Similar to Six Degrees, this site also had its users make accounts through their emails, allowing them to make friends and add them to a personal network. One of the main differences between Six Degrees and Friendster is that on Friendster you were able to share messages, photos and videos with others if you were on each other’s networks. This site grew by a lot very rapidly with 3 million users after a couple of months, and eventually reached more than one hundred million users. Friendster remained very popular for many years, but was eventually shut down in 2019.

2002- LinkedIn

LinkedIn was also one of the very first social media networks, but it had a different purpose than some of the others. LinkedIn was created to allow people to connect with business contacts, along with finding job opportunities. It is different today because unlike Facebook and Instagram, users on LinkedIn usually only connect with other people they already know. People still use it today, and it is the most used professional network available today.

2004- Facebook

In 2004 the world’s most used social site was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. These were students who were attending Harvard University at the time. Just like the other sites, Facebook was made for another way to connect with friends. Facebook was just about the social side, by letting users find friends, users could connect with old friends all thanks to the mutual friend feature. Facebook has become so large in the almost 20 years it has been around that it has bought other social media platforms like Instagram. However, there has been some controversy over this because now many sites lack originality and promote the same toxicity which completely defeats the whole purpose of social media, now mainly focusing on the money aspect rather than the actual connection.

2005- Youtube

In 2005 Youtube was created as a video- sharing platform. Most of the early videos posted were tutorials on a variety of things and subjects, or funny random videos simply posted for entertainment and to make people laugh. Youtube was actually founded as a dating service, but quickly grew and changed as a place for people to share videos with their friends. This platform helped people reach out to others and become friends.

Fast forward a few years and five more very popular social media apps were created. Between the years of 2006 and 2016 Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok were made. They all started with the same mission as the other platforms, which was to connect people to others through whatever the app was specialized to do. At first, they were all unique in their own way, for example on Snapchat people would connect by sending photos or videos to each other, while Instagram was about posting photos of yourself or things you are doing so your followers could keep up and in touch with you.

Although social media has changed a lot throughout the years, and sometimes for the worst, we can appreciate how it has brought us to connect with others around the country and world, and sometimes meeting new people or reconnecting with old friends. Social media will continue to evolve with time to keep up with trends and what is most popular, and we are interested to see what social media will bring in the future.