Social Networking Sites You Thought Were Dead

What happened to all those great social networks that came before. Were they relegated to the dustbin of history, never to be seen or heard from again, or did they morph into something else? Their fate may leave a clue to the ultimate destiny of the current social networks.

It seems social media is always changing. Once one thing becomes popular, something is waiting eagerly in the wings to take over. There were plenty of social networking sites from the not so distant past; the social networks that appeared to crash and burn, or were slowly forgotten. But did they really disappear?

Friendster was an early social network before the time of the behemoth, Facebook. Friendster was founded in 2002 and was one of the first major social networks to have over 1 million members. The site even had an offer by Google in 2003 to buy it for $30 million. They turned the offer down.

By 2008, Friendster had 115 million users, but traffic began to decline starting in 2009. Friendster eventually lost all popularity in the U.S., mainly due to the rise in Facebook. At the end of 2009, Friendster was bought by the Asian internet giant, MOL Global. In June 2011, they rebranded themselves as a social gaming site in Asia and discontinued the social networking accounts. Friendster lasted three more years and announced on June 14, 2015, that it was shutting down for good.

Remember when almost everybody had a personal website on GeoCities? The free service started in 1995 and became a hit rather quickly. It allowed internet users to have their own personal home page, and the users were referred to as “homesteaders.” When someone became a “homesteader,” they would choose one of the 14 GeoCities neighborhoods to reside in, and they were then assigned a number. That number actually became the user’s web address, or as GeoCities liked to call it, “street address.”

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