Social media, then and now: Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘The Facebook’ on February 4, 2004, weeks after Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten launched Orkut in January 2004. Elon Musk bought Twitter on October 27, 2022, and renamed it X in July 2023. (Image via X)
2004 will remain a watershed year, a moment in time that changed human interactions forever. The concept of a social media platform began to brew in the 1990s. The first Internet service providers that offered public direct access to the Internet for a monthly fee kicked off in 1989 in the US. India kept its date with Public Internet when VSNL offered annual internet access (for 40 minutes a day) at a whopping Rs 15,000 for its entry-level plan with a 9.6kbps dial-up connection. There were quite a few early movers, the pre-cursors to the modern social media platforms as we know it.
The genesis – 1998 to 2003
The first wave of social networking began in the form of generalised online communities. There was theGlobe.com that went public in 1998 and posted the largest first day gain of any IPO in history up to the date. It was the time of the dotcom bubble. And then there was SixDegrees.com that was named after the concept of six degrees of separation. Users could list friends, acquaintances of family members and send messages or post bulletin board items to people in their first, second and third degrees. The site peaked at 3.5 million registered members. And in 2003 came Friendster that allowed uses to contact other members and share online content and media with their contacts. It became a platform for dating and making discoveries – music, hobbies. But it wasn’t quite the real deal yet. 2003 also saw the birth of LinkedIn and a couple of other social platforms like Hi5 and Myspace as well as Skype. But it wasn’t till the first quarter of 2004 that the stage was set for social media as we know it today.
2004 – The year it all began
It was on January 22, 2004, that Orkut, named after its creator, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten, made its debut. Initially, members became fans of their friends and also got to evaluate if their friend is Trustworthy, Cool or Sext on a scale of 1 to 3. Orkut also allowed anyone to visit everyone’s profile unless users were on a designated ‘ignore list’. By 2008, it was one of the most visited websites in India where the platform became the premier social network. By 2014, the traffic from India was the second highest on the platform (second only to Brazil).
Less than two weeks after the Orkut debut a bunch of Harvard university students launched what would go on to become the most influential social media network of all time. A face book refers to a student directory in American universities that features photos and basic information. Until 2003, these were offline versions. It was the same time that Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson (the oldest continuously published daily college newspaper in the US) that he could build a ‘universal face book’ within Harvard in a week. Zuckerberg and Harvard students Eduardo Saverin invested $1,000 each and on February 4, 2004, they launched TheFacebook.
2004 – 2009: Social media scales up
TheFaceBook.com became Facebook in 2005. While it started as a Harvard-only site, it quickly expanded to include other Ivy league schools before being accessible to the general public. By 2005, Facebook crossed the 6 million mark and soared beyond 300 million members by the end of the decade. The platform launched its photo share feature (with no restrictions on storage) in 2005 and News Feed (with updates about the activities of your Facebook friends) in 2006.
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It was the same year when Jack Dorsey published the first Twitter message (on March 21, 2006) – “just setting up my twttr”. Dorsey, one of the co-founders, explained later that the definition of the word ‘twitter’ captured the essence of their platform – a short burst of inconsequential information’. But soon there would be millions of messages of huge consequence on the platform.
This half of the decade also saw the launch of other significant platforms like YouTube, Flickr (for image and video hosting and sharing), Tumblr (the micro-blogging site) and Sina Weibo that became Weibo, currently one of the biggest social media platforms in China. In November 2009, WhatsApp launched as a chat service only for iOS devices. It would change the face of text messaging across the world over the next decade and a half.
2010-2015: The Photo and video sharing era
On October 6, 2010, the Instagram app makes its debut on the Apple App Store and is downloaded 25,000 times on Day 1. The timing was perfect; the app came hot on the heels of the iPhone 4 with its improved camera, and Instagram gave these users a perfect platform to share their photos. It’s not the first photo sharing platform to launch in 2010. Pinterest made its appearance in January 2010. Two years later Snapchat arrived and offered users the option of sharing 10-second videos.
Video sharing came to Instagram in 2013. It’s the same year that Vine, a video-sharing and social media service launched after being acquired by Twitter for $30 million and instant messaging app Telegram made its first appearance.
The first half of the 2010s saw a wave of consolidation and launches. Microsoft paid $ 8.5 billion to acquire Skype while Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in what will go on to become one of the smartest buys in the social media space. Google made multiple moves in the space, launching Google+ in 2011 and Hangouts in 2013. It shut down Orkut in 2014.
Also read: Timeline of Facebook’s major acquisitions since inception
2016 and beyond
Big Tech has acquired negative connotations over the last decade as debates rage about the effects of social media platforms on mental health and spreading hate. Governments across the world began to grill top executives of Big Tech and social media platforms about the domination of these platforms.
Facebook became Meta, a social media behemoth with Instagram hitting 2.4 billion users (up from 110 million in 2013) and Facebook crossing the 3 billion threshold by 2023. Instagram’s popularity is only matched by TikTok, a video-sharing platform that debuted in 2018 and has now grown beyond 1.5 billion users. The app remains popular with younger users (almost half its users are under 24).
YouTube that began the 2010s with 200 million annual users finished 2023 with 2.7 billion users. It still remains the world’s second most popular platform (in terms of global engagement) only behind Facebook. While we’ve seen alternatives like Clubhouse (launched in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic), Parler and TruthSocial, the main social media platforms have seen a huge consolidation.
Twitter became X after it was acquired by Elon Musk and Meta continues to ramp up numbers with Instagram and its influencers altering marketing playbooks. Social media has changed how we consume content, how we engage with our friends and work networks and the dissemination of news. It’s tough to imagine even Mark Zuckerberg could have envisioned this in 2004.
