When Was Social Media Created?

The Short Answer

Earlier systems already let people publish, message and form online communities. Bulletin board systems and commercial online services were social spaces before the Web became mainstream. SixDegrees matters because it assembled the features that researchers later used to define a recognisable social network site.

That distinction explains why different timelines give different dates. A history of online community can begin in the 1970s. A history of Web-based social networking can reasonably begin in 1997. A history of mass-market social media usually centres on the early and mid-2000s.

What Came Before Social Media?

Long before profiles and feeds, people used networked computers to exchange messages and gather around shared interests. The Computer History Museum records the rise of online services and bulletin board systems by the end of the 1970s. These systems supported discussion groups, chat, email, news and other communal activities.

The WELL, founded in 1985, explicitly described itself as an online community. Services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy later brought messaging and discussion to larger audiences. They did not all have the public profile-and-connections structure associated with modern social networks, but they established the central behaviour: people using a network to publish and respond to one another.

The World Wide Web made that behaviour easier to organise around pages, links and searchable identities. During the 1990s, personal home pages, forums, instant messaging and early community sites each supplied part of the pattern. SixDegrees brought several of those parts into one service.

A Working Social Media Timeline

The dates below mark changes in format, not the invention of online conversation from nothing.

Milestones from networked community to recognisable social networking

Year	Stage	Why it matters
1979	DIAL-UP	Bulletin board systems and early online services were already supporting communal discussion, chat, news and email.
1985	COMMUNITY	The WELL was founded as an online community, showing that persistent digital groups predated the modern Web.
1997	NETWORK	SixDegrees launched with profiles, visible friend lists and connection browsing. Academic researchers identify it as the first recognisable social network site under that definition.
2002	EXPANSION	Friendster helped take profile-based social networking to a broader audience and became an important bridge to the next wave.
2003	IDENTITY	LinkedIn and Myspace showed how the format could support professional identity, music, personal expression and large public networks.
2004	MAINSTREAM	Facebook launched at Harvard, then expanded beyond campuses. The era of mass-market, real-identity social networking accelerated.
2005	VIDEO	YouTube made user-published video a central social format rather than a specialist activity.
2006	REAL TIME	Twitter popularised short, public, rapidly updating posts and helped move social media toward the real-time feed.

Why The Definition Changes The Date

“Social media” is broader than “social network site.” A forum is social media in the ordinary modern sense because users create content and interact. A social network site is a narrower format organised around profiles, articulated connections and the ability to see or move through those connections.

Researchers danah boyd and Nicole Ellison used that narrower definition in their widely cited history of social network sites. They identified SixDegrees as the first recognisable example because it combined features that had previously appeared separately. Their account also explains why the service closed in 2000: the format existed before most people had enough online contacts to make a visible network consistently useful.

So the most accurate answer depends on the question behind the query:

• When did online social communities begin? By the late 1970s, with important roots even earlier.
• When did the first recognisable social network launch? 1997, with SixDegrees.
• When did social media become mainstream? During the 2000s, as profile networks, blogs, photo sharing and video platforms reached mass audiences.

What Changed After 1997?

The decisive innovation was not simply letting people post. It was turning identity and relationships into visible, navigable parts of the product. Later services added specialised networks, custom profile pages, photo and video publishing, mobile access, real-time feeds and algorithmic ranking.

Those changes also altered social-media strategy. Publishing became easier, but distribution increasingly depended on the design of each platform. The durable lesson for a business is older than any feed algorithm: choose a defined audience, create material that serves it, build genuine relationships and measure whether attention leads to a useful outcome.

Sources And Further Reading

• Computer History Museum: Networking and the Web timeline
• Computer History Museum: Dialing Up Community
• boyd and Ellison: Social Network Sites — Definition, History, and Scholarship
• Computer History Museum: Communicating Through Computers

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