We tend to think of Facebook and Myspace as launching “social media” technologies into the mainstream.
From there the social network was a fully formed concept that we’ve all used for the last couple of decades to stay in touch with friends, make new connections, and increasingly endlessly scroll until we struggle to remember why we picked up our phone.
In reality, we owe the modern social network to several small innovations along the way, going back to the mid-1990s. Myspace and Facebook did a lot to define it. But what social platforms look like today took a lot of little steps.
The very beginning of these innovations reaches back to way before we had any social networks to the first internet forums (1970s), Usenet groups (1980s), and AOL Instant Messenger (1990s). The core features of modern social networks mostly took shape from 2000-2020, bringing us to the modern vertical video scrolling most internet users experience today.
The below list is our review of how we got here. The innovative, the good, the bad, and the to-be-determined.
(see an obvious omission or mistake, let us know, we update this list regularly)
What was the first social network?
Six Degrees, launched in 1997, was the first recognizable social network. It was the first site that let you build a profile, add friends by name, and browse their connections.
Earlier services carried conversation. Six Degrees carried the social graph, which every platform since has been built on.
The oldest social platform still running is a different question. LinkedIn launched in 2003 and is the longest-lived of the major networks that survive today.
The 1980s and 1990s: Before Social Media, the First Online Communities
1980 – Threaded Discussion (Usenet)
Before social media was organized around people, it focused on topics. Dial-up bulletin boards started it in 1978. Usenet arrived in 1980, built by graduate students at Duke and UNC, and grew into thousands of newsgroups.
You picked a group about a subject and read what was there. Popular topics in the 80s included climate change, Star Trek, and comic books. The reply threading Usenet invented is still echoed in how comment sections work today across all social platforms.
1988 – Real-Time Chat (IRC)
Internet Relay Chat added real time responses to the Usenet model. Chat programs like IRC gave users a handle, nut no profile yet. Users did not have followers, so nobody had a personal brand to defend, and the conversation focused on the subject at hand. Many group chat and Discord servers since work from a similar framework.
1994 – The Personal Page (GeoCities)
GeoCities gave people a page of their own. Each page existed inside a themed neighborhood like sports (Colosseum), entertaining (Hollywood), and finance (WallStreet). Your page was still a place (rather than a person), but for the first time the place belonged to you.
1995 – First Use of “Social Media”
While building an online website and community called Matisse in Tokyo, Darrell Berry published a paper titled “Social Media Spaces“. It is the earliest documented use of the phrase anyone has produced.
His argument was that the web could not stay an archive of static documents. It had to become a network of people engaging with each other. He wrote that in 1995, two years before Six Degrees and nine years before anyone was using the phrase in meetings.
1997 – Profiles and Friends (Six Degrees)
Six Degrees, named for the famous Kevin Bacon connection theory, is the original social network as we would think of them today. They were the first to have profile pages and the ability for profiles to connect with one another, aka “Friends.”
1999 – Updates, Followers, Groups (Livejournal)
With LiveJournal, we see the beginning of what would ultimately become “the feed” of content. LiveJournal was an early blogging platform with a social layer. Users could post updates and express themselves, allowing their connections to keep up with them.
LiveJournal also allowed for different types of connections for the first time. Both asynchronous following (where I can follow you with you having to confirm or follow me back) and groups.
The 2000s: Early Social Platforms and the Features They Invented
2002 – Friend Discovery, Profile Comments (Friendster)
Friendster was the first to allow profile comments and made it easier to find and connect with more people.
2003 – Profile Privacy (Hi5)
We won’t see many privacy innovations on this list, but Hi5 was the first to allow you to have a public profile or restrict your profile only to your friends.
2003 – First Business Social Network (LinkedIn)
You might not realize it but LinkedIn is the oldest modern social network. Founded before MySpace even.
2003 – Scale (MySpace)
MySpace did not bring a lot of new features that we would call innovations. They had the Top 8 friends list. A focus on music that defined the platform. And maybe went a bit too bar in letting users customize their profiles.
Most of what they did was perfect the concept of a social network to the extent that it took off and went mainstream for the first time. They launched in 2003 and were sold to NewsCorp in 2006. Later in 2006, it became the most popular website in the world at the time, with 75 million+ unique visitors each month.
When Facebook launched, many of its innovations were not a part of its original success. The Wall, a profile with updates from you, from your activity, and your friends, was the lifeblood of the platform. It was an evolution of posts and comments from past social networks and the pre-cursor to the modern feed most modern social networks thrive on.
2004 – “Social Media” Used as an Industry Term
Technology analyst Chris Shipley put the term “social media” in front of the content creators of the day, bloggers, at the first BlogOn conference in Berkeley in 2004.
She declines credit for inventing the term, but she does allow that “I get some credit for putting it into the lexicon.” AOL’s Ted Leonsis was quoted using it as early as 1997, and Tina Sharkey registered socialmedia.com in 1999.
2005 – Video and Comments (YouTube)
YouTube launched in 2005 as somewhere to put a video. Comments followed within months, and that turned a file host into a place where people talked back.
That December, Saturday Night Live aired Lazy Sunday. NBC did not put it on YouTube. Somebody else did, and it ran up millions of views before the network had it pulled.
That was the tell. A sketch the rights holder never uploaded outran the network that made it, on a platform with no schedule and nobody deciding what aired next. Every entertainment-first feed since has been built on the same bet: give people somewhere to post and let attention sort it out.
2005 – Upvotes (Reddit/Digg)
Digg and Reddit both launched as news aggregators. Reddit slowly turned into more of a social network and discussion platform and still is today. From the beginning, one of the big contributions from both platforms to social media was their upvote and downvote buttons. The original “engagement” click, sends a signal back to an algorithm about what content was popular. This predated Facebook Like for several years.
2006 – Microblogging (Twitter)
They brought us the 140 characters that we all love and hate. And of course, it’s now 280 characters. Plus links, photos, video, live video, Medium posts, etc. But still, microblogging gave us mobile access to social media for the first time. You could text to and from 40404 and access most of the features of the site. It was very advanced at the time.
I remember live Tweeting a Barack Obama rally in 2007. Without Twitter, there was no way to share or cover that event live. There was no iPhone yet.
2006 – The Feed (Twitter)
Facebook launched the News Feed in late 2006, but Twitter was there first. Twitter launched the original social media feed of content. They had public content and a feed of content from all the friends you followed on the site. It was so successful, that Facebook quickly followed suit. Every social network today has some type of content feed. It’s strange to think that we ever had social media without it.
2006 – @ Replies/Tags (Twitter)
The @ symbol was used before Twitter to signify that you were speaking to a person, but Twitter was the first social network to perfect it as an official feature. This organic innovation from Twitter users is the first step of what led Twitter to become a platform focused on discussion, rather than just stand-alone “eating lunch” status updates.
2007 – Social Ads (Facebook)
Myspace and Facebook both had ads before this. But when Facebook launched their ad platform as a stand-alone product in 2007, it cemented their dominance. It made them into the ad giant they are today and has forever changed the advertising industry (and privacy).
The 2007 launch is the one everyone dates it to, but Facebook had been selling advertising for three years already. Flyers arrived in 2004, letting a local business buy banner placements against a single college campus, and later became an auction product called Flyers Pro.
2007 – Hashtags (Twitter)
As with many of the innovations on Twitter, users first started using hashtags organically to tag group discussions or events. Hashtags are now used on almost every major social network (Snapchat and Reddit are still holding out for some reason).
2007 – Retweet (Twitter)
Once again, Twitter users innovated, looking for a way to reshare and amplify content. First with “Retweet” and then the shorter “RT”. It took until 2009 for Twitter to make the Retweet button an official feature on the platform. Even today some users prefer to type out RT.
2007 – Live Streaming (Justin.tv)
Justin.tv launched in March 2007 with Justin Kan wearing a camera on his head and broadcasting his life continuously. The word for it at the time was lifecasting.
The gaming channel it spun out in 2011 was called Twitch, which grew so much larger than the parent that the company renamed itself in 2014 and shut the original site down.
Twitch was eventually followed by other livestream apps and platforms:
- 2015: Meerkat launches in February and Twitter buys Periscope weeks later, releasing it in March. Two independent apps, not the big networks.
- 2015: Facebook Live arrives in August, limited to public figures at first, open to all in 2016. This is when live video becomes normal for brands.
- 2016: Instagram Live follows in November.
2009 – Like Button (Facebook)
The famous Facebook thumbs up launched in 2009 and never looked back. Likes, favorites, and reactions have become increasingly important to social algorithms and increasingly complex.
2009 – Verification (Twitter)
Twitter was the first social platform to verify users. Co-founder Biz Stone rolled it out in June 2009, with the now famous white checkmark on a sky blue badge. Twitter started verification in response to a lawsuit from MLB Cardinals manager Tony La Russa over a parody account posting in his name on the platform.
Facebook added a badge in 2013 and Instagram in 2014, and it became the default trust signal across every network. Meta turned it into a paid subscription in 2023. LinkedIn and Reddit have more recently rolled out verification options to combat AI-powered spam on their platforms.
2009 – “Social Media” becomes an industry term
While social media websites had existed for years, there was no universal term to name the industry, yet. Depending on who you asked this was social software, social networking, consumer-generated media, user-generated content, the blogosphere, new media, or Web 2.0. Web 2.0 and social networking were especially popular.
In late 2009, social media overtook all other terms in Google search trends and “social media manager” became a job title.
As the industry began to take shape, Social Fresh hosted the first of its flagship social media conferences in Charlotte, NC.
Naming a category is what makes it fundable. Almost nothing changed technically in 2009. What changed is that the thing got a name you could put in a plan.
The 2010s: Social Platforms Scale and Go Mobile
2010 – Mobile Social Network (Instagram)
In 2010, Instagram launched on iOS as the first mobile-only social network. Since their success, all social networks have been primarily if not exclusively accessed on smartphones.
2011 – Ephemeral Content (Snapchat)
When Snapchat originally launched as a privacy-focused messaging app, we had our first privacy innovation in social media since Hi5. This time limit on content would carry over to their Stories innovation as well.
2013 – Stories (Snapchat)
Snapchat Stories were the biggest innovation to how we use social networks since the feed first started with Twitter. Still today, stories are driving tons of growth and new content trends across the industry.
2013 – Short Video (Vine)
Vine launched short video editing from smartphones. Even though Instagram overtook Vine and Twitter would eventually acquire and shutter the product, some of the biggest trends in social media today, from stories to IGTV to TikTok, can be traced back to what Vine started.
2015 – Short-form Video (TikTok)
There is a lot to consider when it comes to innovation from TikTok. But I think the most important innovation to look at is that TikTok has become the first real social network that is focused on short-form video. And no, YouTube does not count. Maybe Vine, but alas, Vine never survived.
We may very well look back and see TikTok’s algorithm-first approach as very impactful in the social landscape. TikTok users do not need to create a profile or ever like/follow. TikTok uses their video-watching activity and psychographics (what they like and how they feel) to customize the content in their feed.
This also creates a business case for TikTok.
The biggest innovation remains a true vertical video social network with a clean user experience for discoverability, profiles, following, sharing, commenting, and groups.
2017 – The First Vertical Ad (Instagram Stories Ads)
Instagram opened Stories to advertisers in January 2017. Every ad format before it was a rectangle borrowed from somewhere else and cropped to fit.
This was the first mainstream format designed for the shape of the phone: full screen, sound on, vertical, and gone in a few seconds. Facebook brought the same format to its own app in 2019. It set the creative brief that Reels, TikTok, and Shorts all still use.
2018 – Social Data Gets Locked Down (Cambridge Analytica)
In March, 2018 news broke that data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, harvested through a quiz app, had been used for political targeting.
As a consequence Facebook reduced access to its API, closing the ability to view a lot of user data. Everything about audience building got harder, and the industry’s assumption that platform data would always be freely available ended here.
2019 – Hiding the Like Count (Instagram)
Instagram began experimenting with hiding public like counts, starting in Canada and expanding through 2019 and 2020.
Ten years after Facebook shipped the Like button, a Facebook owned platform ran a serious experiment to turn down its own engagement mechanics on mental health grounds.
2019 – The First Platform Enabled Creator Ad (Instagram)
Instagram introduced branded content tags and the “Paid partnership with” label in 2017. In June 2019 it went further and let a brand run a creator’s own post as a paid ad, from the creator’s handle, with the brand’s budget behind it.
This reflected existing paid media and creator marketing team best practices. Now, creator content is media you can buy, target, and measure like any other placement on Meta and many platforms.
2019 – FTC Influencer Disclosure Guidance
Six months later the regulator drew the lines. On November 5, 2019 the FTC published Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers, its plain-language guide to when a creator has to say a post is paid.
The trigger is a material connection: money, free product, a discount, a family, or employment tie. Any of those and the relationship has to be disclosed. The FTC recommended example disclosures included the #ad or #sponsored hashtags in captions.
The 2020s: Social Video Takes Over and Regulation Begins
2020 – Short Video, Everywhere
TikTok proved the format. In August 2020 Instagram shipped Reels, and the copy became a major competitor to Tiktok as well as the majority driver of Instagram’s future engagement. Short vertical video (aka short-form video or SFV) stopped being one app’s feature and became something every platform adopted as a primary content format.
For marketers this is where one creative asset started working across almost all social platforms. The question changed from which network to which aspect ratio.
2021 – The Feed Goes Algorithmic (TikTok et al)
TikTok’s For You Feed fed the evolution of algorithm-based social feeds that did not need you to follow a single account to learn which content you liked. Meta rebuilt Instagram and Facebook around the same idea.
Follower count stopped being distribution. A brand with two million followers and a weak first three seconds now reaches nobody, and an account with two hundred followers can reach millions.
2022 – Video Takes the Majority of Social Time
Video passed the halfway mark. EMarketer put video at 53.3% of time spent on social networks in 2022.
Social stopped being a place where people read or like photos and became a place where people watch videos. If more than half the available attention is video, a content plan built on images and text is competing for the smaller half.
2025 – Social Platform Pushback
Criticism of social media was not new. A specific, copyable framework was. Jonathan Haidt’s four norms are blunt: no smartphones before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools from bell to bell, and more independence and free play in the real world.
Through 2025 they moved from arguments in Haidt’s book to school district policy and parent group pledges. Whatever you make of the underlying research, the framework did what no earlier criticism managed. It gave people something concrete to adopt, and 16 became the number everyone argued about.
2025 – Age Limits Start To Become Law
The United States moved first and unevenly, state by state. Eight states enacted restrictions on minors, and courts blocked several on First Amendment grounds, which is why the American map is still a patchwork.
On December 10, 2025 Australia became the first country to actually enforce one, requiring platforms to keep kids under 16 years old off social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. In 2026, France, Denmark, and Austria added age bans as well.
2026 – Meta Starts To Make Big Changes for Younger Users
On August 26, 2026 Meta settled child safety claims from dozens of US states for up to $18 billion in damages and a significant list of product changes.
Under-18 accounts get a default two-hour daily limit. Meta apps Facebook and Instagram switch off between midnight and 6am. Teens get a prompt every 15 minutes of continuous use and reminders at 60 and 90 minutes a day. Only a parent can raise any of it.
Excited to see where we go next.