[danso]

> We also had "everyone" on MySpace. And before Friendfeed. And in times when most did not know what "internet" is, geocities.

This is an absurd generalization. I've always grown up with computers and was the only one in my circle of friends to ever use BBSes. Five years ago, it blew me away to see random strangers logged on to Facebook...it was bizarre to see an online network as something normal people used...before that, adoption was rare, even in college through the 00s. Facebook has a dominance of the consciousness that no other network prior to it came close to having...there is simply no parallel

[jessedhillon]

MySpace had a very significant mindshare among a similar population segment. IIRC it wasn't obvious until ~2006-07 that they would be overtaken or that the relatively superior UX of Facebook would matter so much. Looking back now, having been on both, MySpace had an uneducated feel to it that was somewhere a little bit higher than Youtube comments but not by much -- chain letters, trolls, fake profiles, random friend requests and ultimately a lot of spam -- these were things that all made FB shine by comparison as a college-only network (it came to Berkeley ~2004-05)

But certainly by that time, "ordinary" people were already primed for online social networking. I agree that this doesn't quite extend to GeoCities though.

[jiggy2011]

ICQ, Yahoo and MSN messenger were the "social networks" of the late 90s early 2000s. And IRC for the nerds.