From LiveJournal to MySpace Tom: A Social Media Timeline

Today’s social landscape is busy and changing fast. Platforms like TikTok and Twitch are disrupting older platforms and amassing new audiences. But as the online world expands and diversifies, social media’s evolution is often buried in the past.

Join Bec and Ruby from our socials team as they take a trip down memory lane, reminiscing about social platforms and the way they’ve shaped the modern era.

So … A/S/L?

MSN Messenger (1999)

“What’s your addy?”

Before iMessage etc. was MSN Messenger, the Microsoft owned instant messaging service. Cue flashbacks: customisable (ie. unreadable) fonts. Dashboard Confessional lyrics in your username. And signing on/off to get the attention of someone.

Despite these suppressed memories, MSN gave a whole generation of people their first taste of expressing themselves online. All before the real age of social networking and life on the internet. (And, of course, a lesson in touch-typing.)

MSN Messenger switched off to most users in 2013 after Microsoft bought Skype. The way it touched lives on forever in a touching obituary from the BBC.

LiveJournal (1999)

LiveJournal was part social networking site, part online diary and 100% oversharing. Brad Fitzpatrick created the site at age 18 in 1999, and it has a teenage earnestness about it that is hard to shake. Through LiveJournal, blogging became the global phenomenon we know it as today.

In the past, this kind of communication only existed on message boards and obscure forums. Now anyone could have a blog. Anyone with something to say could publish their innermost thoughts to the world.

LiveJournal meant something to its user base. It was a safe space to explore, create and keep in touch. This was at a time where connecting with people online was new, giving teens their first opportunity to find kindred spirits living outside of their hometowns.

The platform not only brought together niche fandoms, but introduced people to new ones. This behaviour of either seeking out or stumbling upon online communities and joining them is seen inside platforms like Facebook, but has built whole new platforms, like Twitch.

MySpace (2003)

To say MySpace defined a generation is an understatement. For many millennials, MySpace was the start of our ideas of an online identity. It fostered subcultures, and created them

We all remember the eponymous NPC (Non-Player-Character) Tom from MySpace. His profile pic is hard to forget. He shaped our communication habits, ideas of self-promotion and how we discover music.

MySpace was an iteration of Friendster, created in 2003. It became the biggest social networking site in the world soon after. It’s no coincidence that these years are often considered the peak of emo subculture. Being emo and MySpace existed in an almost symbiotic relationship.

The ability to target these niche online communities created a new found ‘digital word-of-mouth’, launching the careers of unknown musicians (like Arctic Monkeys and Little Dragon) leading to an influx of music pages on the site. Before the ‘Discover Weekly’ algorithm, MySpace was an integral discovery tool for musicians and fans alike.

MySpace encouraged us to get creative, to rank our top friends and find new bands. It was an innocent space online, where you could upload RAWR XD photo albums, publicly declare your besties and add Hello Kitty GIFs to your profile.

Facebook (2004)

Love it or otherwise, Facebook has shaped the zeitgeist of the 21st century so far. Before becoming part of daily lives, The Social Network had humble(ish) beginnings. It was born from a Harvard dorm room from one unknown Mark Zuckerberg — known then as ‘Thefacebook’ (which is what your parents might still call it).

The omnipresent ‘newsfeed’ came in 2006, which the public complained overwhelmed them (simpler times). This changed the way people consume content, and introduced the concept of knowing what your peers are up to, all the time.

The following year, Facebook introduced its advertising platform, opening up a whole new world to marketers. We’ve seen these ads evolve from simple links, to videos, to the giant data machine that they are today.

Fast forward a decade (and major data/political scandals). Zuck made a statement in 2019 promising that Facebook would return to its original values of connecting people with… people. We saw a shift in our newsfeeds back to friends and family, with sponsored content becoming the widely-accepted form of brands talking to us, through hyper-localised and niche targeting.

As years and iterations of the platform have passed, Facebook has evolved along with its users (chicken, egg?). It started with liking meaningless pages with names like ‘dropping out of college to become a full-time cat’ and writing on your friends walls. Now we join passionate and niche Facebook groups and create group chats on Messenger.

YouTube (2005)

Hot fact: YouTube’s initial iteration was an online dating site. Following a lack of video uploads from people looking for love, its founders allowed videos of any kind allowed on the site. Fifteen years later, YouTube is now the second most visited site in the world after Google, with 1 billion hours of video being consumed daily.

Thanks to YouTube’s business model, everyday people have become online sensations, making millions in revenue from video views.

Unlike influencers on Instagram, YouTube ‘creators’ write, direct, edit and star in quality content to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. This has cultivated an engaged audience willing to spend time watching longer-form content, catapulting creators to celebrity status.

While creators uploading videos about everyday tasks (like skincare) is rampant, unusual stars have also found fame on the platform… like Juno Birch.

This path to stardom hasn’t gone unnoticed by YouTube’s younger audience base, with a recent survey showing that kids in the US and UK would rather grow up to be a YouTuber than an astronaut.

For those who didn’t grow up with social media this may sound alarming, but it reinforces social media’s place in today’s society, and the fact that anyone with something to say can be heard.

Twitter (2006)

Where would we be without hashtags and @’ing? These symbols are now part of our vernacular, and came to our consciousness thanks to Twitter.

Twitter started as an SMS-based service back in 2006 (hence the 140 character limit). As usage increased and the platform evolved, users created new jargon and different ways to use the service.

In the early days Twitter users had no way of replying to one another. Users began including an ‘@’ symbol before a username to identify another user within a Tweet. This blew up to the point that Twitter added the functionality to the platform natively, and is an integral part of the platform today.

Hashtags follow a similar tale. ‘Tagging’ content was already found across the web, and Twitter users were keen to see some kind of “groups” feature. These started out as hashtags you had to follow and unfollow on a specific topic. Now, anyone can invent a hashtag, and we see them #peppered #everywhere #across #the #web #daily.

Today, the hashtag is a very powerful tool for the public. Whether that’s following news, joining conversations, social justice campaigns like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, trending topics and events.

These social eavesdropping tools have also spawned ‘Cancel Culture’ — where celebrities and everyday people are called out for poor behaviour en-masse, effectively removing their validity through boycotts or losing their jobs. Whether this mob mentality is healthy or not is too big a question for this blog post. Either way, as author Jon Ronson says “we are living through a great renaissance of public shaming” and Twitter has been at the forefront of this movement.

Tumblr (2007)

Micro-blogging site Tumblr may still around today, but its peak popularity was 2014, at which point there were 106 million new posts each day on the platform. Tumblr had its own unique brand of culture, functionality and creativity. People could create their own little microcosms, manifested through ‘threads’. People had the ability to post their own content, to reblog other’s contents and respond to threads. This ability to curate your own world and space governed by visuals formed a lot of early ideas of personal branding.

Tumblr has so many facets, niches and controversies, which makes it hard to distill. It fostered fandom, created subcultures and had issues with porn. It taught millions of people new things that they never would otherwise have found (at least without such ease). Being on Tumblr felt like being in a secret club, you were in the know and tapped into a global network.

Before the cultural cache of Instagram celebs, Tumblr cultivated some cerebral and relevant personalities. Take Rookie’s Tavi Gevinson for example. This pre-Instagram influencer culture was dependent on curation, requiring the user to have a well established aesthetic. Real ones remember ‘what is air.’

Vine (2013)

Vine was a platform where users could share six or seven second-long, looping video clips. This created a multilayered culture of video memes that are hard to understand unless you’re in. Remind you of something? Vine is a precursor to TikTok, where remixing sounds and visuals to the point of un-recognisability is not only the norm, but encouraged.

Vine amassed 200 million users in its three short years and was sold to Twitter, before shutting down in 2006 after futile efforts to monetise the platform. Today, millennials hang on to the remnants of Vine, with catchphrases and videos crossing into other platforms. Attention spans altered, and short-form video lives on.

Only Vine-ers would get it.

Looking to the future

Today’s social landscape is busy and changing fast. Platforms like TikTok and Twitch are disrupting older platforms and amassing new audiences.

Live-streaming, e-commerce and video editing are all possible without ever leaving the platform itself. We’ve also seen the homogenisation of platforms, where one platform emulates popular features of another.

The internet is ever-changing, and Gen Z tend to drive new creation and behaviour patterns. One thing is certain: humans have an innate desire to connect and we will always find new ways to foster these connections.

Rebecca Andersen and Ruby Giles work in Bolster’s Social Media team.