Excerpts from a great post w/links over at http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/10/the-history-and-evolution-of-social-m...
PRECURSORS TO SOCIAL MEDIA 1979 Usernets
Late seventies BBSs
1980 Onlineservices like CompuServe & Prodigy
1985 Genie
1988 IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
1995 ICQ MAJOR SOCIAL NETWORKS 1997 Six Degrees. Purchased in 2000 for $125 million and shut down in 2001.
1999 LiveJournal.
2000 World Of Warcraft / MMORPGS
2002 Friendster. 90 million registered users, 90% users from asia. Popular with gay men, attendess of Burning Man and bloggers
2003 Hi5. 60 Million active members. Asia. Latin America and Central Africa.
2003 LinkedIn.
2003 MySpace. Customization possible.
2004 Multiply.
2004 Orkut. Google´s social network. 65 million users, mainly from Brazil and India.
2004 Facebook. Surpassed MySpace in 2008.
2007 iRovr. Only on iPhone.
2008 Kontain. NICHE SOCIAL NETWORKS 2005 Ning. Platform for creating niche social networks. 1.5 million existing networks. No coding or programming knowledge required. MEDIA SHARING 2003 Photobucket. Purchased by Fox in 2007 for $250 million
2004 Flickr. 3.6 billion images as of June 2009
2004 Revver. Sharing revenue 50/50 split with video creators.
2005 Youtube.
SOCIAL NEWS & BOOKMARKING 2003 Delicious.
2004 Digg.
2005 Reddit. REAL TIME UPDATES 2006 Twitter
2007 Tumblr.
2009 Posterous. No initial signup is needed. Post content via email. LIFESTREAMING & LIFECASTING 2006 Ustream
2006 Justin.tv. 41 million unique vistitors each month.
2007 Friendfeed. Purchased by Facebook 2009.
