70 Fun Facts About Social Media

Which 1997 website, named after a theory of separation, is considered the first social networking site?

Founded by Andrew Weinreich in New York, it let users list friends and family and reached about 3.5 million registered members.

Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer in 2003 from which search giant?

Founder Jonathan Abrams took venture money instead at a $53 million valuation.

Which company bought the then-hottest social network, home of 'Tom', for $580 million in July 2005?

By June 2006 it was the most visited website in the US; in 2011 Specific Media and Justin Timberlake picked it up for about $35 million.

Which pop star co-bought Myspace in June 2011 for roughly $35 million?

Myspace had been the largest social network in the world from 2005 to 2009.

Mark Zuckerberg launched 'TheFacebook' from Harvard on which date?

He and Eduardo Saverin each put in $1,000; membership was limited to Harvard students at first.

What was Zuckerberg's 2003 Harvard site that asked users to pick the 'hotter' of two students called?

He was reported and faced expulsion, but the charges were dropped.

Facebook's thumbs-up 'like' button was first switched on in which year?

Vimeo had added a like button in 2005 and FriendFeed in 2007; Facebook bought FriendFeed six months after launching its own.

Which video-sharing site added a 'like' button as early as November 2005?

Developer Andrew Pile said they liked the Digg concept but did not want to call them 'Diggs'.

Facebook rebranded its parent company as Meta in which year?

The change signalled its bet on the 'metaverse'; the service itself had about 3.07 billion monthly users by December 2023.

YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded it on February 14, 2005; Google bought it for $1.65 billion in stock the next year.

'Me at the zoo', the first YouTube video, shows Jawed Karim in front of which animals?

The 19-second clip from the San Diego Zoo went up on April 23, 2005 and has passed 400 million views.

How much did the search company pay to acquire YouTube in 2006, in stock?

The deal, in Google stock, closed on November 13, 2006; a Nike ad with Ronaldinho had been the first video to hit a million views.

Twitter began in 2006 as a side project inside which podcasting company?

The first prototype was an internal tool for Odeo staff; the founders then bought Odeo back from its investors.

Twitter's original character limit of 140 was doubled to 280 in which year?

The limit was removed entirely for paying subscribers in 2023.

Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 for approximately how much?

He announced the rebrand to X in July 2023, and the bird logo was fully retired by May 2024.

What was Twitter's overload error image of birds hoisting a sea creature nicknamed?

Yiying Lu drew it, and designer Jen Simmons coined the name in a September 2007 tweet.

Who first proposed using the # symbol to group tweets, in a 2007 tweet?

He never tried to patent it, saying hashtags were 'born of the internet, and owned by no one'; the OED added the word in 2014.

Before Twitter, the # symbol was already used around 1988 to label channels on which chat system?

Network-wide IRC channels get a #, while server-local ones use an ampersand.

Instagram began life as a location check-in app with what name?

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger felt it was too close to Foursquare and refocused on photos; the app hit a million users in two months.

Facebook bought Instagram in April 2012 for approximately how much?

Instagram reached a billion users by June 2018.

Which post overtook the record-holding egg as the most-liked Instagram post in December 2022?

The carousel has more than 76 million likes; the egg had held the record since January 2019.

The @world_record_egg account that briefly ruled Instagram was revealed to belong to whom?

Chris Godfrey and two friends later used the egg in a Hulu ad about mental health.

Which name did the ephemeral-photo app founded by Evan Spiegel launch under on iOS in July 2011?

Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown were Stanford students; the ghost mascot Brown designed is called Ghostface Chillah.

The ghost mascot 'Ghostface Chillah' is named after a member of which hip-hop group?

Co-founder Reggie Brown designed it before being ousted from the company months after launch.

LinkedIn was launched in May 2003 by Eric Ly and which co-founder, later a famous venture capitalist?

Microsoft bought the network in December 2016 for $26.2 billion, its largest acquisition at the time.

Which company bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion?

LinkedIn now claims more than a billion registered members in over 200 countries.

Reddit was founded in June 2005 by two roommates at which school?

Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian were joined by Aaron Swartz that November, and Conde Nast bought the site in 2006.

What is the name of Reddit's alien mascot?

Subreddits often dress the alien in themed variants; the company listed on the stock market as RDDT in March 2024.

Pinterest grew out of an earlier app by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra meant to replace paper catalogs. What was it called?

Pinterest opened as a closed beta in March 2010, and Silbermann personally wrote to its first 5,000 users.

WhatsApp's founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum had both previously worked at which company?

Facebook bought the app in February 2014 for about $19.3 billion; the name is meant to sound like 'what's up'.

Roughly how much did Facebook pay for WhatsApp in 2014?

By May 2025 the app had 3 billion monthly users, making it the most popular messenger in the world.

Vine, the looping video app Twitter bought for $30 million in 2012, limited clips to how long?

Twitter shut it down in January 2017, years before TikTok made short loops mainstream.

Which company bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013?

Founded by David Karp in 2007, it is now owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

Meta's Threads became the fastest-growing consumer app ever by reaching 100 million users in how long?

That beat the record set by ChatGPT; the app was built after Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.

Which former Twitter CEO started Bluesky and later left its board?

The network runs on the open AT Protocol and opened to the public in February 2024 after an invite-only year.

Which country's internet forum recorded the first known use of the word 'selfie', in 2002?

Oxford Dictionaries made it word of the year in 2013 and gave it an Australian origin.

Ellen DeGeneres's 2014 'Oscars selfie' was meant as homage to whose record 18 nominations?

She pulled twelve other stars into the frame at the 86th Academy Awards.

The word 'meme' was coined by which scientist in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene?

He proposed memes as units of cultural transmission, decades before image macros.

Shigetaka Kurita's original 1999 set of emoji for NTT DoCoMo contained how many characters?

The set is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the emoticon itself dates to Scott Fahlman in 1982.

Which emoji did Oxford Dictionaries name its word of the year in 2015?

It was the first time a pictograph won the honour.

Which two platforms did Facebook acquire in 2014, extending it into messaging and virtual reality?

Instagram had come two years earlier, the year Facebook went public.

At its April 2008 peak, Myspace drew roughly how many visitors a month?

It was the largest social network in the world for several years and pulled in $800 million in revenue in fiscal 2008.

Twitter's founders first called the service what before settling on the full name?

The public launch came on July 15, 2006; by 2012 users were sending 340 million tweets a day.

Which magazine publisher bought Reddit in October 2006?

Reddit later became an independent subsidiary of Conde Nast's parent, Advance Publications.

Facebook was the most downloaded mobile app of which decade?

As of July 2025 it ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world.

Roughly how many hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute as of May 2019?

By mid-2024 the platform held about 14.8 billion videos.

Instagram Stories, launched in 2016, copied its disappearing 24-hour format from which ghost-logo rival?

By January 2019 Stories was being used by 500 million people a day.

Jawed Karim said YouTube was inspired by being unable to find clips of the 2004 tsunami and which other event?

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the other event he could not find video of.

In which Canadian province is Facebook's minimum age 14 rather than 13?

The name Facebook comes from the printed 'face book' directories handed to US university students.

Roughly what share of Twitter's accounts were estimated in 2020 to be run by bots rather than humans?

That worked out to some 48 million accounts, and 10 percent of users produce over 80 percent of tweets.

Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram with which Brazilian software engineer?

The two later left together in September 2018, six years after selling the company to Facebook.

The very first Instagram post, made in July 2010, was a photo of what?

It showed South Beach Harbor at Pier 38 in San Francisco; the famous dog-at-a-taco-stand shot came a few hours later.

Until 2015, every Instagram photo had to be framed in which shape?

The 640-pixel square matched the width of the iPhone screen at the time; the limit was raised to 1080 pixels and other shapes in 2015.

When Instagram's Android app launched in April 2012, how quickly did it pass one million downloads?

Six days later Facebook announced it was buying the company.

In which year did Instagram introduce hashtags?

They arrived just three months after launch; the ability to search recent posts by hashtag was removed entirely in 2023.

What was IGTV, which Instagram launched in June 2018?

It allowed uploads of up to ten minutes, or an hour for big accounts, and auto-played as soon as it opened.

Who was named head of Instagram in October 2018 after the two founders stepped down?

Under him Instagram tested hiding like counts so users would 'worry a little bit less' about them.

Instagram rolled out Reels to which country in July 2020, right after TikTok was banned there?

Reels had first been tested in Brazil in late 2019; by November 2024 it was averaging 150 billion views a day.

In June 2022, Instagram raised the maximum length of a Reel to how many seconds?

Full-screen ads of up to 30 seconds had already been added to Reels a year earlier.

Meta's Threads app, launched in 2023, was built to compete with which platform?

An earlier, unrelated Instagram app also called Threads, a close-friends messaging tool from 2019, had been shut down in December 2021.

Instagram Direct, the platform's private messaging feature, launched in which year?

It got conversation threading in 2015 and began merging with Facebook Messenger in 2020.

Instagram passed one billion registered users in which year?

It had taken just two months to reach the first million and a year to reach ten million.

According to Wired, roughly how much did the 2012 Facebook deal net Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom?

He had closed the company's first $500,000 seed round only two years earlier.

Systrom's March 2010 $500,000 seed round came from Baseline Ventures and which other firm?

He was still building a check-in app at the time and pivoted to photos later that year.

Which lip-sync video app did ByteDance buy for nearly $1 billion in 2017 and merge into TikTok?

The Shanghai-based startup merged into TikTok on 2 August 2018, taking its accounts and data with it.

TikTok's Chinese sister app Douyin launched in September 2016 under what original name?

Developed in about seven months, it hit 100 million users within a year.

The social network Orkut, huge in Brazil and India before closing in 2014, was named after what?

Orkut Büyükkökten's site was run from Belo Horizonte for its final years before closing in September 2014.

Bebo's founders invented which backronym to explain the site's name?

Husband and wife Michael and Xochi Birch sold it to AOL in 2008 for $850 million, a deal the BBC later called one of the dotcom era's worst.

Mastodon's federated servers talk to each other using which protocol?

Eugen Rochko released it in 2016; posts were historically known as 'toots'.

Discord's creator Jason Citron had earlier sold which social gaming network to GREE for $104 million?

The money funded Hammer & Chisel, whose failed mobile MOBA Fates Forever exposed how bad gaming voice chat was.