Like and Share This Quiz on Social Media History

Long before TikTok existed, the lip-syncing app Musical.ly was launched in 2014, and had achieved a $1 billion value by 2017. Musical.ly was purchased by the Chinese company ByteDance — the owners of TikTok — who chose to merge the two in August 2018. TikTok grew to ultimately surpass Google and Facebook as the world's most popular web domain in 2021.

While anonymity may be easy to achieve on other social media platforms, Nextdoor has always required users to submit their real names and addresses for location verification. Nextdoor allows for hyperlocal interactions between members of the same neighborhood, with discussion topics ranging from local elections to dog poop, plus other neighborhood news.

Reddit's alien mascot Snoo was sketched by cofounder Alexis Ohanian while he was bored in class during his senior year at the University of Virginia. Snoo was introduced upon Reddit's launch in 2005, with the character's name representing the simple question: "What's new?" Throughout Reddit's expansion, Snoo has been redesigned across thousands of subreddits to reflect each community's particular interests.

Twitter user Chris Messina (not the Hollywood actor) first proposed using the hash symbol (aka pound sign or number sign) to make topics more searchable, with the first-ever instance referring to BarCamp, a series of tech workshops he helped create. Though Twitter founder Biz Stone was dismissive of the idea at first, the hashtag concept caught on among users during the 2007 San Diego wildfires, and subsequently grew in popularity.

In 2009, actor Ashton Kutcher eclipsed the one million followers mark on Twitter, becoming the first user to do so. Kutcher beat out the CNN account — with whom he had developed a friendly rivalry — by less than 1,200 followers. In 2017, pop star Katy Perry became the first Twitter account to reach 100 million followers.

On April 23, 2005, software engineer Jawed Karim uploaded the 19-second video "Me at the zoo" to his new website, YouTube, making history. The quick clip was the first video ever uploaded to the site, which now receives more than 500 hours of video content every minute. Today, YouTube is the second-most popular website in the world, behind its parent company, Google, which purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.

Attempting to capitalize on the growing social media boom, Yahoo! stepped onto the scene with its blog-based site Yahoo 360°. The product launched in 2005 with an invite-only userbase before opening up to anyone a few months later. 360° featured profiles, blogs, friend updates, and integration with other Yahoo! offerings like Flickr and Yahoo! Messenger, but despite its tech specs, the network wasn't popular enough and was shut down in 2008.

BlackPlanet.com first debuted to the world in 1999 as an online social network specifically catered to Black Americans. Based on the relative success of its sister site AsianAve, BlackPlanet served up editorial content and message boards aimed at Black people across the country. The site took its name from the 1990 Public Enemy album "Fear of a Black Planet," which one music critic called "the ‘Sgt. Pepper's’ of hip-hop."

In the summer of 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen made the first-ever Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client and server at the University of Oulu, Finland. His code creation allowed internet users to send short text messages to each other in chat rooms hosted on servers. Adoption of the new internet protocol was slow but steady, and eventually IRC servers had hundreds of thousands of users discussing everything from sports to music to trivia. While most IRC servers are defunct now, their legacy lives on in modern text messaging and social networking.

Vine, which was founded in June 2012, was a unique take on social media. Its content consisted of user-posted, six-second video loops. The strange, simple concept quickly took off, and before it was even officially launched, the company had been acquired by Twitter. The app had more than 200 million users by December 2015, but Twitter couldn't properly monetize the service and shut it down in 2016. During its impressive three-and-a-half-year run, Vine laid the groundwork for the present domination of TikTok and changed the face of social media.

Shortly after attempting to purchase Friendster in 2004, Google launched its own social network, Orkut. Named for its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, the site had profiles and friend lists like most social media sites, and users could also add videos to their profiles from either YouTube or Google Video. Despite backing from its powerful parent company and some advanced features, Orkut was only ever popular in Brazil, and shut down in 2014.

Launched in March 2003, Friendster quickly became the hottest social network on the internet, and Jonathan Abrams, the company's founder, became a hot commodity himself. Adopting the tech star persona, he became a Silicon Valley darling. Unfortunately, after a bad venture capital deal and site infrastructure problems, Friendster's users flocked to Myspace and Facebook. Today, Friendster is a Malaysian gaming company, having sold its social media patents to Facebook in 2010.

Snapchat was founded in 2011 on the idea of a social media app with content that disappeared. The app was released as "Picaboo," a play on the words “picture” and “peek-a-boo,” but just two months later it was rechristened "Snapchat." In the decade since, the platform has gained more than 350 million active monthly users, and more than 3 billion snaps of photo and video content are generated every day.

Predating the thousands of popular animal accounts that the app hosts today, Instagram's very first post featured a stray dog. Posted by Kevin Systrom, co-founder of the photo-sharing network, the picture appeared on the app in October 2010 with the simple caption, "test." Today, the post has more than 300,000 likes, which is but a small fraction of the app's total of more than 1 billion users.

Foursquare broke the standard social media mold when it debuted in 2009, as it was primarily a location-based service. You could connect with friends and share updates, as with usual social media, but where Foursquare stood out was with its "check in" feature, allowing users to broadcast their current location to the rest of their network. In 2014, Foursquare split into two apps: Swarm, which was similar to the app's earlier network, and Foursquare City Guide, which served as a hub for local recommendations.

LinkedIn, the world's largest business-oriented social network, was founded in 2002; 14 years later, the site was purchased by Microsoft for $26 billion, the company's largest-ever acquisition at the time. Upon the deal's completion, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "Together we can accelerate the growth of LinkedIn, as well as Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics as we seek to empower every person and organization on the planet." LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members worldwide.

In March 2006, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey posted "just setting up my twttr" on the new social network that would later be renamed Twitter. The site emerged from the ashes of a dying podcast company called Odeo, and launched as an SMS-based social network for sharing small status updates. It wasn’t until 2010 that the now-famous blue bird logo was introduced with the name “Larry,” after NBA legend Larry Bird.

Launched in 1997, SixDegrees.com is considered the first social networking site to grace the internet. It allowed users to create profiles, list their friends, and search their friend lists. Though these features existed on other sites before, SixDegrees was the first to combine them into one coherent social network. The site quickly became popular and attracted millions of users, but failed to become a sustainable business and closed in 2000.

In 2004, the social media startup that would become Facebook was founded at Harvard University with the URL "thefacebook.com." The site quickly became popular among college students, and one year later, future Napster founder and investor Sean Parker joined the company's team. He convinced Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, to drop the word "the" from the company's name. They purchased the new URL for $200,000 and, almost 3 billion users and many acquisitions later, Facebook, now called Meta, continues to dominate the internet as one of the world's most powerful companies.

Tom Anderson founded the early social media website Myspace in 2003, and guided it toward becoming one of the most popular sites on the internet. When users of the site created a new account, before connecting to other friends they knew, their first friend was always Tom, who greeted them in his profile picture with a smile.