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Hotmail
Hotmail was one of the first email services. Within a year and a half of being released, it had over 8 million subscribers. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in December 1997. -
SixDegrees
SixDegrees is generally referred to as the first social media website. Its name comes from the "six degrees of separation" concept, where all things are connected by six or fewer degrees of separation. Most current social media sites follow the model of SixDegrees. -
Friendster
Friendster was one of the first social media sites. It capitalized on the popularity and familiarity of Napster with a name that sounds somewhat similar but denotes that it has a social aspect. It was one of the dominant social media sites until 2004 when it was overshadowed by MySpace. -
MySpace
MySpace was made by eUniverse employees who sought to improve upon Friendster. eUniverse used its already large network of users to put MySpace among the top social media platforms at the time. MySpace was the largest social media site from 2005 until 2008, when it was overtaken by Facebook. -
Facebook
Facebook was originally made for students attending Harvard. After Mark Zuckerberg released the site, he was sued by three other Harvard students who claimed that they were misled into helping create a website that competed with their own. The lawsuit was settled by granting the three students 1.2 million shares of the company. Facebook continues to be the top social networking site today. -
World of Warcraft
Blizzard released World of Warcraft (WoW) as an online multiplayer continuation of their Warcraft series. WoW was the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in 2009, although their player count has steadily been decreasing since then. -
Youtube
Youtube is said to have been created when one of the founders found it difficult to find videos of Janet Jackson's 2004 Superbowl performance wardrobe malfunction. The original function of the website was supposed to be a video dating site. The site was eventually changed to allow any videos. -
Reddit
Reddit was founded by college roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. The pair pitched their idea to a startup incubator, Y Combinator, and were subsequently accepted and funded by them. The website allows users to create and maintain their own communities based on a common interest. -
Twitter
The first iteration of Twitter was in internal messaging service for Odeo employees. Twitter's founders eventually bought Odeo, the company they worked for. The platform is somewhat hard to describe, as it doesn't follow the same formula as other social networking platforms. It gained a large amount of popularity in 2007 at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in which they tripled their daily tweets. -
Imgur
Imgur was created as a gift to Reddit. It is an image hosting platform that was designed to combat compatibility issues between various image hosting sites and Reddit. The site has since become its own community, adding user accounts and comment sections. -
Instagram
Instagram started out as a project called Burbn. The founders decided to focus this project on photography, as they felt that it was becoming too similar to Foursquare. Instagram was bought by Facebook in September of 2012. The app was originally only available on iOS devices but eventually expanded to Android and then Windows devices. -
Snapchat
The idea of Snapchat was based around sending pictures to other users that disappeared after a short amount of time. The app was originally called "Picaboo". In 2012 a lawsuit arose when two of the founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, claimed that a third founder, Reggie Brown, had to creative connection to the app, and therefore no share of the company. The lawsuit ended with Spiegel and Murphy paying Brown $157.5 million. -
Google+
Google+ was attempt at a social networking platform by Google. It started out as being invite only, as a way to increase interest in the site. The website itself never became quite as popular as hoped, although many members joined simply because they had to in order to use other Google services.
