Social Media

1997 – ongoing64 items

internettechnology
People walking with their phones, 2018. Photo: Rawpixel Ltd, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
People walking with their phones, 2018. Photo: Rawpixel Ltd, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

From a list of friends to a feed for billions

In 1997 a New York start-up let people list their friends online. Three decades later more than half the world uses a social network, most of it on a phone. This timeline follows how it happened, and not only in California: Korea had Cyworld before Facebook existed, Brazil made Orkut its own, and WeChat and TikTok came out of China.

How to read it

Bands show the lives of platforms that rose and fell — SixDegrees, Friendster, Orkut, Google+, Vine, Musical.ly — and Myspace’s years on top. Zoom in to the day for launches, takeovers and the moments that showed what these networks could do, from the Arab Spring to 6 January 2021. Filter by business, messaging, video, protest or regulation, or by worldwide for everything beyond Silicon Valley.

Items

  1. SixDegrees.com

    ≈ 3 years · New York

  2. OICQ, later QQ, launches

    Shenzhen

  3. SixDegrees sold for $125 million

  4. Cyworld’s mini-homepages

    Seoul

  5. Friendster

    ≈ 12 years, 11 months

  6. Myspace on top

    ≈ 7 years, 10 months

  7. Orkut

    ≈ 10 years, 8 months

  8. TheFacebook opens at Harvard

    Kirkland House, Harvard

  9. Mixi launches in Japan

    Shibuya, Tokyo

  10. “Me at the zoo”

    San Diego Zoo

  11. News Corp buys Myspace

  12. “just setting up my twttr”

    Odeo, South Park, San Francisco

  13. Facebook’s News Feed

  14. Google buys YouTube

  15. VKontakte launches

    Saint Petersburg

  16. The hashtag

  17. Plane in the Hudson

    Hudson River off West 48th Street, Manhattan

  18. Facebook’s “Like” button

  19. Sina Weibo opens

    Beijing

  20. KakaoTalk

    Seoul

  21. Instagram launches

    Dogpatch Labs, Pier 38, San Francisco

  22. Arab Spring

    ≈ 1 year, 6 months

  23. Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire

    Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia

  24. Ben Ali flees Tunisia

    Tunis

  25. WeChat launches as Weixin

    Tencent Guangzhou Research and Development Centre

  26. Egypt’s 25 January protests

    Tahrir Square, Cairo

  27. Egypt switches off the internet

  28. Mubarak resigns

  29. LINE launches

    Shibuya, Tokyo

  30. Google+

    ≈ 7 years, 9 months

  31. Snapchat launches as Picaboo

  32. Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion

  33. Facebook goes public

    Facebook, 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park

  34. A billion people on Facebook

  35. “Gangnam Style” passes a billion views

  36. Vine

    ≈ 3 years, 11 months

  37. #BlackLivesMatter

  38. Musical.ly

    ≈ 4 years, 1 month

  39. Facebook buys WhatsApp

  40. Microsoft buys LinkedIn

  41. Instagram Stories

  42. Douyin launches in China

    Beijing

  43. #MeToo

  44. ByteDance buys Musical.ly

  45. Cambridge Analytica revealed

  46. Zuckerberg before Congress

    Hart Senate Office Building, Washington

  47. Musical.ly becomes TikTok

  48. Facebook bans Myanmar’s army chief

  49. Facebook fined $5 billion

  50. Twitter bans Trump

  51. A billion people on TikTok

  52. Frances Haugen testifies

    Russell Senate Office Building, Washington

  53. Facebook becomes Meta

  54. Musk agrees to buy Twitter

  55. Musk takes over Twitter

    Twitter, 1355 Market Street, San Francisco

  56. EU Digital Services Act in force

  57. Threads launches

  58. Twitter becomes X

  59. Three billion people on Facebook

  60. The US TikTok law

  61. Supreme Court upholds the TikTok law

    Supreme Court of the United States

  62. X fined under the DSA

    Berlaymont, European Commission, Brussels

  63. Australia’s under-16 ban takes effect

  64. TikTok’s US joint venture