You probably didn’t realise that it’s social media’s 25th birthday this year.

Back in 1997, a website called Six Degrees attempted to show that we’re all connected by just six degrees of separation. It featured messaging between members and the ability to invite people to the platform.

It was probably a little ahead of its time though and closed in 2000.

Five years later, Friendster arrived and picked up where Six Degrees left off. It was originally a dating site where friends would set you up with their other friends to date.

It was a terrible dating service but gained momentum as a way for friends to chat with each other and post thoughts about their lives. This was a true social network, but it grew too fast and suffered terrible outages that saw its users flocking to MySpace and just a year later, to Facebook.

At the same time as Facebook was finding its feet, LinkedIn, Photobucket, Flickr and WordPress fired up their servers for the first time.