Facebook launched in 2004, restricted at first to a handful of university campuses. By the time it did, the basic idea of a social network — a personal profile, a public list of connections, ways to share content with them — had already been tested, refined, and in some cases had already peaked, by a earlier wave of sites.
Classmates.com (1995)
One of the earliest sites built explicitly around social connection, Classmates.com let users find and reconnect with former classmates from school and college, organized around a searchable directory of institutions and graduating years. It predates the term "social network" but shares its core premise directly.
TheGlobe.com (1995)
Founded by two Cornell University students, TheGlobe.com let users personalize their own space, publish content, and connect with others around shared interests. It became a notorious symbol of dot-com-era excess after its 1998 IPO produced one of the largest first-day stock price gains ever recorded at the time, before the underlying business collapsed along with the broader dot-com crash a couple of years later.
SixDegrees.com (1997)
Often credited as the first site to combine the core features that would come to define social networking — a personal profile, a visible list of confirmed friends, and the ability to browse your connections' connections — SixDegrees grew to roughly 3.5 million registered users before shutting down around 2000 to 2001. Its founder later argued the site was simply ahead of the broader internet population it needed to be genuinely useful.
LiveJournal (1999)
Part blogging platform, part social network, LiveJournal let users maintain a running journal while also friending other users, whose posts would then appear in a combined feed — a structure that anticipated the social media feed years before Facebook or Twitter existed. It built particularly devoted communities around fandoms and creative writing.
Friendster (2002)
Widely regarded as the first social network to achieve genuine mainstream popularity, Friendster grew to millions of users within its first few months by focusing specifically on connecting real-world friend networks online. Technical growing pains and strict policies around fake or duplicate accounts opened the door for competitors to pull away its user base not long after.
MySpace (2003)
Built partly as a more permissive alternative to Friendster, MySpace let users customize their profile pages extensively and became, for a period around 2006, the single most-visited website in the United States, ahead of Google — a scale of dominance no earlier social network had come close to reaching.
Orkut (2004)
Launched by Google the same year Facebook did, Orkut never gained major traction in the United States but became hugely popular in Brazil and, for a time, India, illustrating how differently these early platforms could take root depending on region — a pattern that has continued in social media ever since.
None of these platforms survived in a form recognizable today, but each one solved a piece of the same underlying puzzle — profiles, connections, feeds, shared content — years before Facebook combined those pieces with the scale and staying power that made it the default.
What Facebook actually got right
Facebook's advantage wasn't originality — nearly every individual feature it launched with had already been tried somewhere on this list. What it had that most of its predecessors lacked was a controlled, credible rollout: starting with verified college email addresses at a single school before expanding campus by campus, it built a userbase that trusted the identities behind the profiles far more than the more wide-open, pseudonym-friendly networks that came before it. That trust, more than any single feature, is a large part of why Facebook displaced nearly everything on this list within a few years of arriving.