The year is 1890. A man on a business trip to New York can’t wait to get married to his beloved back in Boston. Telegraph operators transmit the couple’s vows and the words of the magistrate over the wires. Is this a social network?

Way before the internet, people were using newspapers as a personal ad section much like Craigslist’s Missed Connections is used today. While they were targeted towards an individual, they were public and available to anyone who read the paper to see.

Liederkranz Ball, January 19th, 1862. Beautiful young girl with rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes under black mask and laughs like a siren: wore wine colored satin domino, pearl headdress and jewelry; white camellias, waltzed like a fairy with a tall Spanish gentleman. Gentleman of high social reputation asks for the liberty of an honorable introduction.

Address Strictly Honorable, Herald uptown office.

In 1961, DC comics started including the full name and address of readers whose letters were published. Comic book enthusiasts were able to find each other and the network began to grow. These networks turned into the comic book conventions of today.

Phone phreaks discovered ways for multiple callers to talk simultaneously, creating chat rooms for real-time group interaction through the telephone system in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a common practice for underground scenesters in the 1990s to allow everyone to talk to each other on the phone instead of IRC.

Citizens Band Radio is a system of short-distance radio communications between individuals typically on a selection of 40 channels. No license is required. In the 1970s, CB gained a wider audience than just truckers with people chatting with each other over the airwaves.

Today we think of social media as online platforms that facilitate the creation and sharing of information and everything else via virtual communities and networks. The truth is that social media existed long before the internet.

When the web started, it was read only. The hotness was having a CGI counter that told you how many people had visited your site. It was strictly page views, so if you reloaded the page a million times, your counter would say a million.

Today, most websites have some read/write component. The lifeblood of social media is user generated content. What was your first post? Was it a status update? You can find precursors to Facebook status updates in things like AOL Instant Messenger away messages or auto responses on IRC. We take it for granted that apps today allow users to add any kind of content. With the invention of the profile, it was literally a question of “what the hell should we let people do with this read/write ability?”

Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups. This change in identity has started a new scholarly domain of technoself studies. Technoself studies scholars map and analyze mutually influential developments of identity and technology with a focus on identity. The term technoself denotes an evolving human identity as a result of the adoption of new technology while avoiding ideological or philosophical biases inherent in other related terms: cyborg, posthuman, transhuman, techno-human, etc.

Speaking of cyborgs, I have to take a moment to talk about Neil Harbisson. He is a cyborg artist and transpecies activist based in New York City. He’s best known for being the first person in the world with an antenna mounted to his skull and being legally recognized as a cyborg by a government. Here is a link to his TED talk in the notes, it’s pretty fascinating.

So, back on topic, how is social media different from traditional media? The quality is usually lower on social media. That’s because it’s user generated. Some users generate fantastic content. Some don’t.

Interactivity and usability are inherent in the medium of social media. If someone can’t publish, or can’t figure out how to publish through social media, it doesn’t work.

Social media has high immediacy. You can post a message and get a reply almost instantly.

Then there are the variables: How many people did it reach? How often do things repeat? And how does social media perform in relation to its ability to reach goals like increasing awareness or improving a return on investment?

Facebook has a lot of different features and functionality today, but the main focus has been on communication. The same types of communication can be found on BBSes. Forums allow people to talk to each other, much like groups. BBSes had private mailboxes that allowed you to talk directly to other users, much like Messenger. And one of my favorite features of BBSes, games. Lots of social media have games embedded into them, like Snapchat.

When we look at the web, one of the first places for community was GeoCities in 1994. Geocities allowed users to have their own personal homepage, which allowed people to create their own world and link to other sites that they enjoyed. It was wild, weird, and wonderful. By 1999, it claimed to be the third most visited site on the internet.

There were bad actors too. Classmates.com was founded in 1995, seeking to help users find former classmates and colleagues. Their recruitment practice was super shady. Classmates.com would ask for your friends email addresses to see if they also had a profile, which was most likely not the case. They would then email those addresses claiming that someone wanted to reconnect with them. For any connections to really be made and find out who that someone was, you needed to subscribe and pay a monthly fee.

Big picture fail? Friendster.com. In 2003, Google offered to buy Friendster for $30 million. They turned it down. In 2011, Friendster moved towards social gaming and then shuttered in 2015. So what killed Friendster? MySpace, or rather eUniverse.

eUniverse is an internet marketing company. Several eUniverse employees had Friendster accounts and saw potential in social networking. They decided to mimic the more popular features of the site. In 10 days, the first version was ready to launch using ColdFusion, which is now a fairly dead web language. eUniverse then used it’s 20 million users and email subscribers and invited them to MySpace.

NERD ALERT! Time for a fun programming fact. Friendster was programmed using JavaServer Pages and it couldn’t keep up with the speed of MySpace, which was programmed in ColdFusion. Today, both languages are archaic and pretty slow.

Another interesting tidbit, Myspace could have bought Facebook for $75 million but the CEO of MySpace at the time, Chris Dewolf, rejected the offer. What would have become of Mark Zuckerberg?

Let’s end on a positive social network called Habbo Hotel. It was originally developed as a hobby project entitled Mobiles Disco, which was a virtual chat room. Users can create their own character, design hotel rooms, meet new friends, chat with other players, organize parties, look after virtual pets, as well as create and play games. Habbo Hotel is also designed for children.

From 2000-2005, there were non-paid volunteer moderators but the program was suspended when the company realized they needed a stronger/more professional moderation team. Habbo employs 225 moderators, tracking 70+ million lines of conversation globally, every day, blocking inappropriate users and filtering links to blacklisted sites. In 2011, they were recognized by a European Commission report as one of the safest social networks.

Users in Habbo can also report users breaking “The Habbo Way.” They click on the offending avatar and highlint the offensive pieces of chat. Users can also block other users by clicking an ignore button. The site also has automatic moderation for language, replacing offensive text with the word “bobba.”

Mark Zuckerberg is a bobba.