Social Media is a user-generated digital technology that enables us to exchange ideas, empower our careers, interact with family and friends, market our business and products, etc.
It basically gives us a platform for sharing whatever our interests are on a global level. Platforms may differ in features and functionality, sometimes it may be blogs, forums, websites, or applications, yet they deliver our interest to the target audience.
List of Social Media Sites and their Founders
In this post, we will be listing some of the popular social media platforms, their founders, and the year in which they were founded in chronological order.
| Name | Year | Founder |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 2001 | Larry Sanger & Jimmy Wales |
| StumbleUpon | 2001 | Eric Boyd, Garrett Camp & Geoff Smith |
| 2002 | Reid Hoffman | |
| Myspace | 2003 | Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe |
| Skype | 2003 | Niklas Zennström & Janus Friis |
| Orkut | 2004 | Orkut Büyükkökten |
| 2004 | Mark Zuckerberg | |
| Digg | 2004 | Kevin Rose & Jay Adelson |
| Flickr | 2004 | Stewart Butterfield & Caterina Fake |
| Hi5 | 2004 | Ramu Yalamanchi |
| Tagged | 2004 | Greg Tseng & Johann Schleier-Smith |
| 2005 | Aaron Swartz*, Steve Huffman & Alexis Ohanian | |
| YouTube | 2005 | Chad Hurley, Steve Chen & Jawed Karim |
| 2006 | Jack Dorsey | |
| Tumblr | 2007 | David Karp |
| 2009 | Jon Kaum & Brian Acton | |
| Foursquare | 2009 | Dennis Crowley & Naveen Selvadurai |
| 2010 | Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger | |
| 2010 | Ben Silbermann | |
| Quora | 2010 | Adam D’Angelo & Charlie Cheever |
| Viber | 2010 | Talmon Marco & Igor Magazinnik |
| Line | 2011 | Hae Jin Lee |
| 2011 | Allen Zhang | |
| Google+ | 2011 | Vic Gundotra & Bradley Horowitz |
| Snapchat | 2011 | Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy & Reggie Brown |
| Discord | 2012 | Jason Citron |
| Tinder | 2012 | Sean Rad, Justin Mateen, Whitney Wolfe |
| Telegram | 2013 | Pavel Durov & Nikolai |
| TikTok | 2016 | ByteDance |
| Signal | 2018 | Brian Acton & Moxie Marlinspike |
| Clubhouse | 2020 | Paul Davison & Rohan Seth |
Some of the websites such as Digg, Myspace, Tagged, StumbleUpon, etc may look unfamiliar, but they were the movers and shakers of their time.
📝 SideNotes - :
- The social media that stopped its functioning in 2019 – Google+.
- The social media website that was launched on Valentine's Day – Facebook.
- As of 2021, the largest active global social media network – Facebook.
- The initial name of Snapchat – Picaboo.
- The social media service that was banned in India during the coronavirus pandemic – TikTok (June 29, 2020).
- The social networking site that doesn't allow users to post photos or videos via a desktop computer – Instagram (after acquisition by Facebook).
- The first popular social media site in the world based on the modern concept – Six Degrees ( Founder: Andrew Weinreich, 1996).
- Even though, Classmates.com (founded by Randy Conrads in 1995) and many others were there, but their activities were confined to a certain niche.
- Twitter was acquired by X Holdings of Elon Musk in 2023 and nowadays it is referred to as 'X."
*Aaron Schwartz has been removed from Reddit's founders' page since 2018.