The history of social networking sites can be traced back to the early days of the World Wide Web. One of the earliest social networking sites was Six Degrees, which launched in 1997. Six Degrees allowed users to create a profile and add friends, who were then placed in a network of connections. Six Degrees was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 2000.
Other social networking sites that launched in the late 1990s include Ryze and Open Diary. Ryze was a business networking site that allowed users to connect with like-minded professionals. Open Diary was a more personal type of social networking site, allowing users to keep an online journal that could be shared with friends.
In the early 2000s, the social networking landscape began to change with the launch of Friendster in 2002. Friendster was different from other social networking sites at the time in that it placed an emphasis on connecting people with friends of friends. This concept of social networking would later be mimicked by other sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
Friendster was followed by LinkedIn in 2003, a site that was designed specifically for business networking. Then, in 2004, the social networking site Facebook was launched. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University. The site was originally only open to Harvard students, but it quickly expanded to other colleges and then to the general public.
Today, there are dozens of popular social networking sites, including Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.
