There was a Threads discussion on what was the first social network you were part of. I didn’t participate, but it did get me thinking about my own social network history.
My first experience of an “online” social network was back in the late 1980s when I was at University. A friend of my created something akin to a social network that ran on the VAX system the university had. It was constrained to the university network so could only be accessed whilst on campus.
It was then nearly ten years later, when I went online, that I discovered and used Usenet.
Usenet was (and is) a global, decentralised network of discussion boards called newsgroups. At the time it was very much about discussion, today more about file sharing.
Back then, when you had dial up internet (and was charged per minute) what I did was go online, synchronise my newsgroups, go offline, read and reply, and then go back online and synchronise.
Over the next ten years, that was my primary means for social networking. I did some blogging and using wikis, however what the changed was the launch of micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaiku.
I joined Twitter in March 2007 (and quit in September 2023). I also joined Jaiku.
Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and life streaming service, from Finland, comparable to Twitter, founded a month before Twitter.
Where Jaiku won out for many (in the UK) was that you could use SMS to send and receive messages. If you were in the US, you could do that with Twitter, but it was restricted to the US. I also liked the threaded discussions, something that wasn’t available in Twitter for years.
As with many things, Jaiku was bought out by the Google, and closed to sign ups. This did kill Jaiku as you couldn’t build your community, and sustaining was hard, as people would leave to go elsewhere as that was where the community was.
Since then, we’ve had Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google+, and others, we now have Bluesky, Threads, and the hell that is LinkedIn.
Of course, Twitter is for all intents and purposes dead, and though I like Bluesky, I think the insights, joy and experience that I had with Jaiku (and the early days of Twitter) have probably gone for ever.