The Stories Behind 5 Social Networks That Never Caught On

 What was the first social network you ever joined?

While many people will recall it being Facebook or Twitter, others might remember some of the earlier, less popular social networks. You know, like Friendster, Open Diary, and Orkut? 

A lot these primitive social networks go forgotten, but that doesn't make their stories any less important. After all, these networks laid the groundwork for the social media giants we use today.

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In this blog post, we’ll dive into the stories of some of the earliest social networks -- and why they didn’t stick around.

From Six Degrees to Snapchat: A Brief History of Social Media

One of the first versions of a modern social network, where users could create profiles and interact with one another, is Classmates.com, which launched in 1995 and allowed users to network and share messages and photos with their childhood and college classmates.

In 1997, SixDegrees was founded based on the theory that people are only separated by six levels of friends and family members. This was the first social platform that allowed users to create and curate profiles and laid the groundwork for online networking.

Blogging (on “weblogs,” as they were once called) came to the scene in 1998 with the launch of Open Diary, which included a social networking feature wherein users in groups could read each other’s writing. Open Diary laid the groundwork for later blogging social networks, such as Xanga and LiveJournal in 1999.

In 2002, Friendster launched with the purpose of helping “Circles of Friends” find one another to communicate. Friendster’s launch paved the way for sites like LinkedIn (2002), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004) to launch networks with similar features, such as Myspace’s Top Eight friends, Facebook friend groups, and LinkedIn connections.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s came Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Google+, which experimented with short-form and visual content, as well as aggregating and saving content for later consumption. Some of the latest social networks on the scene include Meerkat, Periscope, Instagram, and Snapchat -- platforms based on sharing authentic, ephemeral, visual content that requires as few words as possible.

Of course, this is a very brief history -- and several social networks were launched and forgotten during this timeline. Needless to say, those networks still played a role in the development of the bigger social landscape we know and use today. Let’s discuss some of the networks we’ve forgotten and why they didn’t stick around.

5 Dead Social Networks You Might Not Remember

1) Friendster

When

Friendster launched in 2002, was rebranded as a social gaming website in 2011, and shuttered completely in 2015.

What

Friendster was the first network that allowed friends to create profiles and share content with their contacts. Friendster was also used to learn about local events, pop culture news, and to connect with brands also sharing information on the platform. At its peak, Friendster had roughly 115 million users around the world.

friendster120808.jpg

Source: VentureBeat

Why it Failed

The deeper issues that led to the demise of Friendster were analyzed by computer scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who conducted Friendster’s “autopsy.” They cited a disastrous site redesign in 2009, after which traffic and users plummeted.

They also determined that the time and effort it took to navigate the Friendster network outweighed the benefits of using it. According to their research, social networks with many users who only had one or two friends were much more vulnerable to collapse than networks with users who had several friends. Stronger networks made up of lots of people meant that if one person left the network, the rest of their friends wouldn’t necessarily follow suit. But if a user had only two friends in a social network and one deleted their account, they would be more likely to do the same -- it would be a boring experience on the platform otherwise.

Friendster wasn’t widely adopted by users’ friends and families, so their time was better spent on other networks where more of their real-world network was online -- namely, on Facebook and Myspace.

2) Eons

When

Eons.com was launched in 2006 and shut down in 2012.

What

Eons was designed to be a social network for baby boomers. Touted as “Myspace for boomers,” it set age restrictions that prevented anyone under the age of 50 from joining-- however, the age restriction was lowered to 40 in 2008. The site never experienced a huge boom in popularity around its launch, and at its peak, it reached roughly 800,000 users.

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