They had their great moment and, as now happens with Facebook, TikTok or Instagram, if you did not have a profile or account on these social networks you were the oddity of the group. Surely you have used them, but you have replaced them a long time ago. If you think they no longer exist, you are wrong. We do a review of old social networks to find out, as in the best television revivals, what has become of them?
What happened to… these old social networks?
My Space
It was born in 2003 and after a time of great success in which there were even companies specialized in making My Space designs for music groups, it seems that it has now been somewhat forgotten. Although open to all types of users, MySpace’s forte was that it functioned as a platform for artists to show their music, their photos and their tours to the world .
Its musical heritage is a real gem because it was the place where emerging artists, big bands or indies went to make themselves known. That’s why it hurt so much that they lost 53 million files (all photos, videos and files) uploaded between 2003 and 2015. It happened in 2019 due to a server migration , luckily the Internet Archive platform managed to gather a small percentage of this loss in a collection called ‘The Myspace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010)’. Despite everything, this network is still active, and has some 32 million users.
This professional social network was dethroned in 2017 by Linkedin (which currently has 303 million users). Although it may seem like Xing got there first, both networks emerged in 2003. Today, despite Linkedin’s total dominance, Xing is still active and has more than 15 million users .
Hi5
Founded in 2003, like the ones mentioned above, with a model similar to that of Facebook (friends, photos, comments…), with the heyday of Mark Zuckerberg’s social network came its decline. Hi5 was a very successful social network, in 2007 it was among the 25 most visited websites in the world and had 70 million users . It currently survives with an approach oriented towards fun and games, but above all dating , since it belongs to the same business group as Lovoo and Growlr.
Other great networks that are no longer with us
Fotolog
A first-generation social network (USA, May 2002 ), a kind of seed of Facebook that, in its basic and free account, allowed you to upload and share a photo and a text a day, make friends and receive comments.
On January 4, 2016 and without prior communication, it closed but returned to the network on the 26th of the same month with residual use . In May 2018 we learned of its relaunch, but on February 1, 2019, without prior notice, Fotolog was no longer available on the web.
Delicious
Also created in 2003, Delicious was one of the most widely used web bookmark management services . Prior registration (free, with a photo and user profile) made it possible to save, store and share links and favorite websites with other users of the social network and all this from any browser and using tags. It has been owned by Yahoo, passed into the hands of the founders of YouTube in 2011 and in 2014 was acquired by Science.inc, a company created by one of the founders of… (guess it?) Myspace . Although it had its great moment, in 2019 the platform was no longer active.
Google +
Since its birth in 2015, the Google Plus network showed an unpromising future; It was no secret to anyone that Google’s social network had not worked as expected, and that was how Alphabet began to dismantle the profiles and functions of the Google Plus network from their respective regular Google accounts. Finally, Google+ disappeared in 2019.