In February 2004, a 19-year-old, flip-flop-wearing Mark Zuckerberg released an online directory of Harvard students. In those days, the internet still felt small. It was mostly about finding webpages, not people.
It turned out that the internet was very good for connecting people. More than 1,000 Harvard students signed up for TheFacebook.com in the first 24 hours. The site started spreading quickly by word of mouth around campus. By the end of 2004, dozens of other colleges were on Facebook. The site had 1 million monthly users. Myspace’s user base was about five times larger, though not for long.
Social media predated Facebook, but nothing had captured the magic of what Zuckerberg and his classmates hacked together. The 2004 version of…