Top Social Media Sites & their Founders

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
LinkedIn 2002 Reid Hoffman
Myspace 2003 Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe
Skype 2003 Niklas Zennström & Janus Friis
Orkut 2004 Orkut Büyükkökten
Facebook 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
Reddit 2005 Aaron Swartz*, Steve Huffman & Alexis Ohanian
YouTube 2005 Chad Hurley, Steve Chen & Jawed Karim
Twitter 2006 Jack Dorsey
Tumblr 2007 David Karp
Whatsapp 2009 Jon Kaum & Brian Acton
Foursquare 2009 Dennis Crowley & Naveen Selvadurai
Instagram 2010 Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger
Pinterest 2010 Ben Silbermann
Quora 2010 Adam D’Angelo & Charlie Cheever
Viber 2010 Talmon Marco & Igor Magazinnik
Line 2011 Hae Jin Lee
WeChat 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.