Social media has drastically transformed our lives to the point where we could not live without it and wonder how we ever did. We did live without it though, and those of us that grew up in the 90s had some websites that in many ways laid the roots for the social media world we live in today.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and take a look at some of the best of these websites that were every bit as addictive as social media, and in some ways even better.
Before Facebook, if you wanted to find an old friend you went to school with, your best option was Classmates. The website started in 1995, and you could search for other people who went to your high school on there.
The website did not have the high rate of adoption that social media has today, so if you wanted to find a specific person on there, chances are you couldn’t. Still, we have to respect how ahead of its time this prototypical social media network was, and surprisingly, it's still around today.
Everything that is totally mundane on the internet now was once revolutionary, and that’s a good way to look at Open Diary. People would post diaries, what we now think of as blogs, on the website, and Open Diary gave people the ability to comment on them, claiming to be the first to do so.
Imagine the days when commenting on blog posts was a revolutionary thing! Well, that’s just how things were when this site started in 1998. It also had different communities on it, like Reddit has today. While it is no longer around today, it lasted all the way to 2015, which is pretty impressive.
Bolt came on the scene in 1996, and it really was a precursor to today’s social media. It had chat functions, a message board, and even notices to send people birthday wishes just as Facebook has today.
The website evolved over the years and moved away from its original format, and it shut shop in 2008, but users who were there in its early years got a stone-age version of the social media platforms that would eventually take over our lives.