Social media platforms, once popular but now forgotten
What's the story
There is hardly anybody one knows, who is not on a social media platform. But not all social media platforms got to taste success like that of Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat. Several of them, even after being the 'rage' in the past slowly vanished, first from the Internet and then from the memory of netizens. Here, is a look back at some of them.
Napster
Napster, music sharing site that ran into trouble
Napster, founded in 1992, was one of the coolest sites out there, allowing users to share audio files. It all went away in 2002 due to a law suit which heavy metal band, Metallica raised against them when they found their album Mission: Impossible II soundtrack was available for free download on the site. It had 80 million registered users when it got shut.
Details
Predecessor of modern-day social media sites
Sixdegrees.com, founded in 1997, was the first among the modern social networking websites like Facebook and Myspace. American serial entrepreneur and financial analyst Andew Weinreich created this site which allowed users to add members in their profiles and they could post messages. This website, ended its operation just three years after the launch and had around 1 million registered members in its hey days.
Friendster
Friendster, the social media turned online gaming site
This social media platform was started in 2002 and was re-launched as an online gaming site in 2011. It again had to be shut down in 2015 due to the lack of interest on the services it had to offer. However, the website was quite popular in here and 90% of its total page views were generated from Asia alone.
Orkut
Orkut, the nostalgia hits hard
Google's social networking site Orkut, named after its creator Orkut Büyükkökten, was launched in 2004. Interestingly, Orkut and Facebook both started off in 2004. The social media platform which was immensely popular in India closed shutter on September 30, 2014 when Google started to push for its new social media platform Google Plus, which was, however, received very poorly by the netizens.
Yahoo
Yahoo Buzz, didn't quite make the buzz
This news sharing social media platform was started in 2008 and closed its operations in 2011. Yahoo Buzz was created based on the model of social-news site Digg, where users could vote for the online stories. Yahoo bracketed the project under "underperforming or off-strategy" and called for its termination along with two other products that it had launched called Yahoo Picks and Yahoo Bookmarks.
Lesser-known facts
The Social media syndrome on the modern world
Thanks to its huge user base, it would take 793 years to watch every Snapchat video made in just a single day. Women spend more time on social media. While women spend around 6 hours per week on average, men spend only around 4 hours per week. People aged 35 to 49 spend more time on social media than people aged 18 to 32.