Tom Truscott @ Usenet: The Grad Student Who Accidentally Invented Social Media

Tom Truscott, creator of Usenet, shares the story of how he built what would become the world's first globally popular digital social network.

Show Notes

For most people, social media is part of the fabric of modern day life. But do you know where digital social media started?

It wasn’t Facebook. Facebook launched in 2004, which was decades after computer networking began. MySpace, it’s well-known predecessor, only launched a few months earlier in 2003.

Some people might point to Friendster, which began in 2002. And, before that, back in 1997, there was a website called Six Degrees. Its creator actually filed the first patents for social networking. However, even Six Degrees wasn’t the first digital social network.

In 1979, more than a decade before Tim Berners Lee launched the World Wide Web, and even before the modern Internet existed, two graduate students at Duke University released a piece of software that would connect people and communities around the world via computers and their modems. That software was called Usenet, and it was the world’s first globally popular, digital social network.

Learn how Usenet got started and how it changed the world on this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

What is Web Masters?

Web Masters is an original podcast that explores the history of the Internet through the stories of some of its most important innovators. In each episode, host Aaron Dinin, a serial entrepreneur and digital media scholar, talks with Internet entrepreneurs who created important websites, tools, services, and features. Some are hugely popular, some you’ve never heard of, and all of them have impacted everything you do online. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look at how the Internet has enabled -- and continues to create -- some of the greatest business opportunities in history from the people who have proven they know how to build successful Internet businesses.