Can you remember the first social media site you signed up to?

Facebook launched in February 2004 and you’d be forgiven for thinking Mark Zuckerberg’s creation is the first social network site. But connecting with people online can be traced back to at least Classmates.com, which launched in 1995 – that’s nine years before Facebook launched from a Harvard dormitory room. Classmates is still running because it evolved with its users – something many other social network sites have failed to do.

So why did other social media networks fail?

Friendster launched two years before Facebook, but the problem was it had a cluttered design which people found confusing. MySpace was the world’s biggest social network until 2008 but it lost focus. People couldn’t understand if it was for friends, music or video. And who remembers BEBO? The British site stood for Blog Early, Blog Often but it fell out of fashion because teens found it easier to update shorter status on things like Facebook.

Can you remember the first social media site you signed up to? Does it still exist?