It was Jan. 16, 1978, and the world was in transition. The Sex Pistols were on the verge of disbanding. Future Macintosh architect Jef Raskin was settling into his new job at Apple Computer Inc. And it was snowing in Chicago. A lot.

But while Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, two members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange, were holed up during the not-so-great blizzard of 78, they werent wasting their time playing Uno or watching "Logan's Run." They were making history.

Just two weeks after that fateful snowstorm (though the pair waited another two weeks to unveil their creation, since "no one believed it could be written in two weeks of spare time"), the world's first online social network was born.


All points bulletin board

It all started with former IBM employee Christensen's simple concept.

At our club meetings, we had a cork board and push-pin bulletin board, with 3x5 cards with things like Need ride to next meeting, Lets get together for a group-purchase of memory chips, Anyone else have a KIM-1? etc. So, I came up with the idea of computerizing that.

Dubbed CBBS (Computerized Bulletin Board System), Christensen and Suess developed a virtual system where users could post public messages akin to an office cork board. Built to utilize Wards own MODEM (later XMODEM) file transfer protocol, CBBS was created to fill a specific need--informing the groups other members of their group about meetings and important announcements without placing dozens of phone calls--but as more members began to dial in to talk and share information through individual postings, the early makings of a small virtual community began to emerge.

The original CBBS ran off a S-100 motherboard kit that Suess had purchased at "some fleamarket" and was limited by its inability to allow simultaneous users. But that's not to say Suess' brainchild wasn't impressive:

(The S-100) was mounted on a BUD chassis with a single density 8 inch floppy drive. On the motherboard was some 8080 cpu (upgraded to a Z80) a Hayes 300 baud modem card, a 3P+S board with the parallel port used for control signals, a Processor Technology VDM video display card, and an 8k memory board. There was also a card with 8 1702 EEPROMS that held the CP/M BIOS, video display drivers, and debug code, all written by Ward. I had a EPROM burner, and Ward made sure all the BIOS variables and experimentor stuff ended up in the last 1702. Musta re-programmed that sucker 10 times a week for a few months.

All that reprogramming paid off. While CBBS didn't exactly set the world on fire--after all, only a select few could take advantage of it--other ASCII bulletin boards followed its lead and began to pop up across a variety of platforms (including AppleNet and GBBS for the Apple II), each with a specific purpose. In the early 1980s, Bulletin Board Systems slowly began to become more streamlined as the Microsoft Disk Operating System brought a measure of standardization to the industry; not long after, MS-DOS BBS programs--pioneered by RBBS-PC and Fido--sprouted up as modem speed improved and boards attracted more members.

As bulletin boards expanded, so did their scope, and soon members began to actually converse with each other, replying and responding to posts as multi-user capability became available. One of the first of these types of communities, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), was conceived in 1985 as a place for Stewart Brands Whole Earth Review readers and contributors to voice their opinions and bounce ideas off one other and grew into one of the oldest, most respected boards around.

But it wasnt until the rise of commercial Internet service providers--first Compuserve, followed by AOL, Prodigy, EarthLink and others--when social networking truly began to take shape.

Connect the dot-coms

As ISPs opened the Internet to anyone with a phone line, once-exclusive clubs became overrun with members, and the desire for individuality quickly took root. Bulletin boards certainly had their place in the fledgling World Wide Web, but a few sites began to offer users more variety and personality with a focus on establishing unique online identities.

One of the earliest and most successful of these virtual metropolises was BHI (Beverly Hills Internet), which turned the BBS concept on its head. Instead of a scanning a giant board to find a topic worth discussing, BHI users (dubbed Homesteaders) chose one of several specialized neighborhoods to call their home. Inside, community members were introduced to a brave new world of HTML that most of them used to create god-awful representations of themselves. As more users began to crowd BHIs chat rooms, galleries, member pages and, of course, message boards--to the tune of six million page views a month--a more suitable name was slapped on the site in late 1995.

Now known as GeoCities, the community flourished in the face of stiff competition from Tripod, Xoom and Angelfire, and by 1997 boasted a Homesteader population of more than a million members.

Around the same time, a pair of Cornell students were launching a boom town of their own called theglobe.com. Built much like GeoCities--but without the Hollywood gloss--the network gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with others with similar interests. Ultimately doomed by its own inventiveness, theglobe became the poster boy for the dot-com bubble, posting a record IPO that fell from $850 million to barely $4 million in less than three years.

But while theglobe may have faded more quickly than its peers, its impact on the social networking world cannot be denied. Founders Todd Krizelman and Stephan Paternot saw in the Internet a way to shrink the world by linking people's common likes and dislikes, a concept even Apple tried to tap into with the launch of its eWorld online service on June 20, 1994. Built around a Community Center where ePeople would gather to meet and mingle, the high-priced eWorld experiment struggled to attract members, lasted less than two years and barely registered on the social-networking radar.

But while GeoCities and theglobe.com struggled to squeeze money out of their significant membership rolls, one specialized service hit on on idea that immediately paid dividends. Founded in 1995 by ex-Boeing exec Randal Conrads, Classmates.com promptly filled a need no one realized they had. Born out of a basic desire to help people rekindle their youth, Conrads archetypal site ignited a torrent of grads eager to hook up with old flames, football buddies, lab partners and crushes.

Registration, as expected, was initially free, but as more and more matches were made, Classmates.com eventually adopted a subscription format that set it apart from its contemporaries. Tens of millions of users signed up to track down their school chums--to varying success; reports of spam, overcharging and cancellation issues plagued the site for years--and its self-contained business model (all communication was routed through Classmates.coms servers) became a paradigm for future networks. An equally successful subscription site, Reunion.com (later MyLife.com), started in 2002 and expanded Classmate.coms objective well beyond the classroom.

(As social networking was still finding its legs, a new method of communication called instant messaging was sweeping the globe, propelled by the 1997 release of AOL Instant Messenger. Though mostly limited to friends you actually knew, IM's system of short, rapid correspondences had no small impact on the proliferation of online communities.)

A bona fide precursor to the modern social networking sites, the short-lived SixDegrees.com (1997-2001) didn't attach any strings or conditions to its match-making. After setting up an account, users with similar likes and dislikes logically began to fill each others rings based on the strength of their connection (closest friends occupied the fifth degree and so on) to create--quite literally--a circle of friends. Inventive and popular, but saddled by an unprofitable, ad-supported system, SixDegrees was sold in 2000 and jettisoned shortly thereafter.

Its focus on indirect relationships, however, didn't go unnoticed. In March 2003, programmer Jonathan Abrams launched the first site that got everything right. Melding many of its predecessors finer points, Friendster was an immediate hit, attracting some three million registrants inside of its first six months. On a path to make "friend" a verb long before Facebook hit the scene and take over a niche it basically created, Friendster should've become a household word. Instead it fell victim to its own success.

As Friendsters logs grew, the site's servers struggled to handle the traffic and performance slowed to a virtual crawl--it's still slower than 85 percent of sites, according to Alexa Internet--but Abrams was too focused on the future to worry about the nagging problems of the present. In November 2003, the free-wheeling CEO spurned a Google buyout offer of $30 million with dreams of turning Friendster into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. Turns out he could have used the muscle.

Next: MySpace, Facebook and Beyond

MySpace invaders

A few months before the Google offer, a small group of L.A.-based eUniverse employees (and Friendster members) trained their sights on knocking the social network site off its lofty perch. Using the full lot of their company's resources--including all 250 colleagues, who were tasked with joining and signing up at least 10 buddies--MySpace hit the ground running and never really slowed down.

Armed with deep pockets and a vast database, co-founders Chris DeWolf and Tom Anderson utilized eUniverses marketing savvy to quickly set itself apart from Friendster. By giving users total control over content and peddling their site as a true virtual self-expression, musicians, celebrities, movies, TV shows, start-ups, presidential candidates and every adolescent with access to a computer soon flocked to MySpace to establish online identities.

While DeWolf reportedly toyed with the notion of a monthly MySpace subscription fee, the site's founders ultimately decided on an ad-generation system that attached semi-obtrusive banners to individual sites; a later platform, dubbed HyperTargeting, sharpened this model by routing advertisers to sites based on users specific interests. After it was sold to Rupert Murdochs News Corp. in July 2005--barely two years after its founding--MySpace aggressively expanded its role as a social networker with MySpaceIM (instant messaging), MySpaceTV (video sharing), MySpace Classified (personal ads) and MySpace Mobile in an attempt to keep pace with the new kid on the block who was making a lot of noise.

Face to Facebook

It all started with Harvard computer science major Mark Zuckerberg's juvenile concept.

In October 2003, an inebriated Zuckerberg hacked into some of his compatriots' "face books" and set up his own site, Facemash, to compare their less-pleasing attributes in a split-screen comparison. It lasted just a few days before school administrators shut it down, but the seed was planted.

The following semester Zuckerberg gathered three of his roommates--Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin--and set to work on creating a universal face book for Harvard students. Wildly popular on campus, Zuckerberg quickly opened up thefacebook.com to other universities (Stanford, Columbia and Yale joined first in March) and by June, the whole operation had moved to California.

Not to be contained to higher education, Facebook (which dropped its "the" and capitalized the "F" in August 2005) expanded to add high school networks later in 2005 and opened its doors to the rest of the world in September 2006. With a healthy buzz already brewing, a cadre of MySpacers confined by their cluttered, ad-laden pages swiftly jumped ship, and by year's end some 12 million registered users were already intermingling.

Light on customization but just as heavy on content, Facebook's clean, uniform pages, instant status updates and orderly Wall of messages forever altered the landscape, and Zuckerberg's vision of a mature, sophisticated system of correspondence may have saved social networking from eventually succumbing to the next hip, young fad.


Members only

While Facebook and MySpace were dueling for supremacy, other sites eager for a piece of the expanding pie were left to fight over the scraps with an array of professional alliances, specialized clubs, cultural leagues and plain old copycats.

In 2004, Ezer Ratchaga launched his holistic personal networked called FriendCircles as a place to organize around hobbies, interests or career goals; and a few months later, Tagged.com opened a site targeted to teens. By 2005, webcam junkies had Stickam and news hounds were flocking to Buzznet to share Hurricane Katrina survival stories--everyone from nightclubbers to artists were given a social niche on the Web.

One notable exception to the field of wannabes was Bebo, a personalized blogging site launched in early 2005. An acronym for Blog Early, Blog Often, Bebo founder Michael Birch, found far greater enthusiasm for his site in his homeland of England than the United States. With an assertive overseas push (Bebo was originally based in San Francisco where his wife and Bebo co-founder, Xochi, grew up), Birch was able to hang with the big boys--and give the ubiquitous MySpace Music a run for its money--leading to an $850 million AOL buyout in March 2008.

Not one to sit on the sidelines, Google got in on the act, too. After its failed Friendster bid, the search-engine giant in 2004 unveiled Orkut (named after its creator, Orkut Bykkkten), an invitation-only social network that encouraged friends to create mini groups to share related videos, pics and ideas. Bogged down by MySpace and Facebook, the network lagged in the U.S. but caught fire in Brazil and India.

Scrappy, smaller sites such as Yelp and Ning carved out their own niches, and around the world, a bevy of social networks united users while dividing and conquering the Internet, including some fairly popular ones--Skyrock (France, Belgium, Switzerland); Multiply (Philippines); Mixi (Japan); Qzone (China); Badoo (2006) (Europe); Nasza-klasa (Poland); Odnoklassniki (Russia); VKontakte (Russia)--but there was still a missing piece needed to bring all the pieces together.

That connection came in the form of small blue bird named Twitter, an instant-message, micro-blogging system that tore down the unintentional barriers created by competing social networking sites. Founded in 2006, Twitter was only marginally successful until the 2007 South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, when usage exploded, tripling to some 60,000 Tweets a day and officially entering the mainstream. A brilliant network where friends were made effortlessly and without bias and a 140-character limit ensured dialogue moved swiftly along, Twitter gave a voice to all those faces out there.

Soon, users all around the world--regardless of their site of choice--were divulging their deepest thoughts, fears and desires in rapid exchanges to as few as one and as many as one million people at once. Finally, widgets added connectivity to MySpace, Facebook and virtually every other social-networking Web site, and tied everything--and everyone--together.

What started as a note system with a dozen or so users has evolved into a global phenomenon with hundreds of millions of users reaching nearly every corner in the world. From elaborate, graphics-intensive personal pages to brief, brisk bulletins, the explosion of social networking sites has succeeded in bringing people closer together as the restless masses stand on the mountaintop, waiting for the next revolution.

Where will it start? Who knows. But we'll probably read about it on Twitter first.