This is the first post in a two-part series discussing the decade in social media. The second post covers social media from 2005-2009.
As the twenty-first century’s first decade comes to a close, I have decided to discuss (what I consider to be) the top social media stories of each year: 2000-2009. This list is completely arbitrary, so I hope you will utilize the comments section below to make your own suggestions. The post is lengthy, so look for the second part tomorrow. Without further ado, here are the top social media stories over the past decade.
2000
Napster brings file sharing to the mainstream and HotOrNot is hot
Napster hit its peak between 2000 and 2001, with tens of millions of people downloading copyrighted music for free. Users congregated in Napster’s chat rooms to discuss specific types of music and transfer .mp3 files directly between machines. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) did its best to shut down the service, effectively accomplishing this in July 2001.
Meanwhile, HotOrNot.com took off as a way for people to rate attractiveness on a scale of 1-10. HotOrNot can be considered a precursor to more traditional social media platforms such as MySpace and Facebook—which many people don’t realize began as a “Hot or Not”-like site.
2001
September 11 brings the internet to its knees
FARK.com, a popular Digg-like news aggregator of the time, published the following headline on September 11, 2001: “NEWS FLASH: PLANES CRASH INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER, PENTAGON. Our link to CNN works (thanks Metafilter). We have news and pics in comments section, if you have any post it there.” Many people posted additional stories to FARK over the ensuing weeks, but this was the first—garnering 374 comments and 25,721 clicks. Nearly 2,900 comments were recorded on the site in the first day on stories posted related to the attacks.
2002
Friendster takes off
Remember Friendster, the frequently-down-site that many of you wasted your time on pre-MySpace and Facebook? The year 2002 was clearly Friendster’s year. Friendster’s servers seemed to fail more often than Twitter’s today, which is part of the reason MySpace took off so quickly in 2003. Do you still have a Friendster account? I deactivated mine a few months ago, after not having been active in years. And you know what? None of my friends had logged in over the past few years, either. Although it’s been largely abandoned in the U.S., Friendster remains strong in Asia. In fact, a Malaysian company bought Friendster earlier this month.
2003
LinkedIn and MySpace
Were you using LinkedIn in 2003? I would guess no, but that was the year PayPal alum Reid Hoffman founded the company. LinkedIn’s impact wouldn’t be felt for a few more years, but the other major social media groundbreaker in 2003 succeeded from the start—MySpace.
By August 2006, 100 million people were online friends with MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson, and the world would never be the same. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but the company eventually sold to News Corporation for $580 million in July 2005. Facebook finally overtook MySpace in number of unique monthly visitors in April 2008.
2004
Social news and social image sharing
Do you Digg? I feel like I don’t know what is going on in the world without my daily Digg dosage. This social news sharing site founded by TechTV (Formerly ZDTV, currently G4) on-air personality Kevin Rose brings together the most popular stories, pictures, and videos floating around the internet to one convenient site where users vote on, or Digg, links to the top of the homepage.
Flickr, now owned by Yahoo, started as a web-based MMOG called Game Neverending. The game never took off, but the idea of sharing pictures with the world resonated with millions of people, and now the site hosts everything from family photos to professional photographers sharing their best work.
Are there other major events from 2000-2004 that you feel should be on this list? What other sites, platforms, or applications emerged in these years that changed the game for social media?
See our second post for major events in social media from 2005-2009.
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