Defunct Social Media Platforms that ye got a kick out of back in the day

z80CPU

I'm talking friendster, GeoCities, or others

I had a free website on GeoCities and met some British web Surfers there through our interest in model building. Then the Omagh bomb happened in 1998 and the British contacts cut off lines with me

I also had a website in the same vein on eircom homepages, which got no hits because nearly all eircom homepages were by national schools and amateur gaa teams.

I also had a free website on tripod.

Lewis_Benson

Mplayer.com/Hearme.com

Mplayer was an online gaming platform, which also had a massive online chat function. it was a downloadable application.

You could join chat lobby's, and from there join or create chat rooms. It had text, voice and camera features, way before its time.

It was bought by GameSpy in the year 2000 and was shut down the same year.

Wasted many hours on it playing quake2/quake3 arena and unreal tournement, and talking shyte to other people from all over the world.

StrawbsM

AOL loved the chat rooms

”You’ve Got Mail”

Riddle101

Bebo. It was all the rage in my secondary school at one point. Used to remember the "How Well Do You Know Me?" quizzes that everybody used to create, and how people write about their interests like music and tv show etc. It wasn't a bad platform tbh, but became an afterthought when facebook became popular.

CalamariFritti

boards

Strumms

Today is the 20th anniversary of the founding ( I’m not sure about operating ) of MySpace.

it’s still operational but I can’t imagine anyone ever really uses it barring a cursory check now and then… so defunct in the general consciousness of people… was huge, now redundant…

I quite enjoyed it initially but looking back the number of complete randomers who’d friend you, people there now who I would not have a notion why they are or why we’d be ‘friends’…….. when facebook came along I remember someone mentioning it to me…. ” No I’m more a MySpace kind of fella, but thanks..I’ll see” 🤪

literally haven’t heard anyone mention MySpace or that it appears in any social context or advertising, in absolute years. Defunct in the general sense.

iamstop

AOL, ICQ, MSN Chat, Friendster, Myspace.

I used to frequent the ITT chat boards even long after I left there. Used to go on Koolkeith.co.uk and irishhiphop.com a decent bit.

Strumms

MSN messenger was quite good and user friendly for its time…probably ahead of its time too. Started using it in the late 90’s I think.

StrawbsM

Ahhh the 56k dial up days

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120926757#Comment_120926757

It was widely used but technically inferior to XMPP and even IRC.

The main driver of success for any of these things is how easily you can convince teenage girls to use it. That's where MSN won out

hoodie6029

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120926288#Comment_120926288

It was certainly much more fun than facebook. You could change your background etc. It was essentially your own website.

If Facebook hadn’t come along Bebo would still have had the old folks join eventually and be radicalised by minion memes.

Lewis_Benson

Paltalk was another.

I met my now wife on ICQ in 99.

Blazer

Paddychat and Yahoo chatrooms...not sure how long they lasted.

L1011

Some specific tech interests I had took to Orkut - google's first attempt at a social network - quite heavily. As did the entire country of Brazil it seemed. Google eventually moved its operations entirely to Brazil but I'd stopped using it by then.

Strumms

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120928125#Comment_120928125

I think the main driver of MSN messenger was that loads of people had hotmail accounts which if my memory is correct was owned and ran by the same company…. Then really most young people just cared about getting and sending emails….and chatting with their mates….live online which was kinda a newish novelty…

I loved the ability to talk to my cousins in England and a friend in Sligo

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120937424#Comment_120937424

Chatting online was so much more engaging back then. Because you had to sit behind your desktop computing machine for the duration.

Motivator

Bebo was a game changer when it appeared. It was the first time people put photos of themselves up from nights out etc. it used to be a goldmine for checking out youngones in school. It was also the first sign of cyber bullying and social status creeping into our lives. There used to be actual rows between friends because Mary never made Niamh one of her top friends or her “other half”. Mad stuff altogether but as someone eluded to above, Bebo was essentially your own website and that was the best thing about it.

I think it was ahead of its time to be honest. If it were to appear now I think it would be immensely popular. Facebook is more or less dead nowadays. Bebo was a cool concept. The flash boxes, create your own skin/background for your page and of course the quizzes. It was brilliant.

mcmoustache

For some reason I had to post this as an image as boards wouldn't let me post it.

Twitter before about 2019. Effectively it has been quite a different atmosphere for several years but it’s really has now become Internet history with the rebrand to X.

Lauras Law

I think I was about the only person that really liked Google Plus!

waywill1966

ICQ and Kik were a couple I used a lot. They still around?

Can’t recall the name of it but I found my way onto sone creepy IRC about 2004, involved in a discussion about the technicalities about how Madeleine McCann was disappeared, freaked me out.

Some time between 2000 and that I put up a genealogical website to try and track down sone long list relatives who might since some mysteries. I had great success on that one, the sought out family in California and others came upon my website and we all connected up in real life. Again, I forget the name of the web hosting platform.

Padraig Mor

IRC. God I'm old.

z80CPU

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120941776#Comment_120941776

Had a working G+ since 2011 to 2016 to when it became ungovernable with all the sleaze on it.

There was a serious decline in quality of content in the final 2 years.

Lauras Law

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120941981#Comment_120941981

Yeah early days on the platform were by far the best, and I really disliked the redesign they did of it towards the end.

Lewis_Benson

The earliest form of any kind of social media I remember was a chat site called chataway.com

It was basically a static page like boards where you replied and hit enter, and the page refreshed.

Vicxas

The old Oceanfree chatroom, posting obscure song lyrics and trying to seem edgy, oh the cringe

Drumpot

I remember , think latish 90s, when internet twas but a fledgling thing, I used to frequent an English international football forum.

Admittedly at the start I was trolling the crap out of them, but trolling with a lot of home truths. But it got to the stage that the owner of the site would message me and ask me to post cause the place would go wild when I was around.

Near the end I actually was a popular poster and I did actually make friends. They sort of accepted me as the Roy Keane who said it how it was.

Was defo banned from a Man United forum or two, for basically accusing our fanbase of being muppet pawns to the glazers, got some warnings here for it and maybe even a ban. Can’t remember.

As I’ve aged I’ve not so much relaxed but learned to amend my posting. Sometimes I don’t post when somebody could do with a life lesson , but I know I’m not the one to give it. Even last night, some idiot trying to make something out of nothing, the posts I didn’t make mean it’s aul goodman.

knucklehead6

Dangerhere.com

An old forum, it was lowly populated but had some great wind up merchants.

Lauras Law

I vaguely remember a social media platform as well that was similar to LinkedIn in that you had 1st level connections, 2nd’s, 3rd’s, etc.

z80CPU

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120943642#Comment_120943642

TIGER ?

random_guy

Nimble was another one from about 2005(?).

I think it was an Irish website also. Kind of a mix of Facebook / Bebo with an added chatroom.

Wasted hours on it.

Lauras Law

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120943830#Comment_120943830

Honestly I can’t remember, and I couldn’t find anything online about TIGER to help me

z80CPU

It's because it was inaugurated at the start of the 3rd level academic year in October 1999. There was a blaze of publicity about it where I was in Waterford IT.

Apparently a site like this heralded the decline of the physical job interview: TIGER featured a special interview room like a chatroom.

The site never took off, and was a delerict ghost site by 2001;

Gone completely by 2005.

Fr Tod Umptious

I never did this but people I worked with were really into it.

I was a thing called MUSH I think, and it was on a mainframe.

They were really into it.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120926288#Comment_120926288

The people who sold Bebo for $850m bought it back for $1m.

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120941365#Comment_120941365

The one thing I remember about bebo was that it was about views on your page and who checked it out. It was a popularity contest.

The guys who created it sold it for a fortune, then after the site went downhill bought it back for a pittance.

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120946959#Comment_120946959

MUSH, MUD's and MUSES were a thing.

they used telnet so they predated web browsers. I was on a battletech MUSE back in 1993. I was on tinyMUD and another one called Armageddon too. It was great fun. It was based entirely on text. In battles there were asci maps. Everything you did required a written command.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon

I think there's still some knocking around that use a web interface.

Edit to add: There was another game called utopia that I played. It's still around. Browser/text based. Used to spent hours on IRC arranging battles.

https://utopia-game.com/shared/