The first famous companies from the social networking era were Friendster and Classmates.com. Despite the fact that none of these companies achieved mainstream worldwide success, both sites continue to operate even today, each with a large user base. Here is a summary of the top social networks up to 2009: Facebook with 350 million, MySpace with 125 million (very popular between 2006-2008), Twitter with 75 million, LinkedIn with 55 million (very popular for business), Classmates.com with 40 million + (10% are paid subscribers.), and Friendster with 90 million (90% of the traffic comes from Asia). The social media market is at present dominated by MySpace and Facebook over the early pioneers.

Facebook emerged as MySpace chief opponent in the worldwide domination of the consumer social network industry. Conceptually, Facebook was very similar to its predecessors, but in comparison with MySpace it had restrictions about customizing the data and profile backgrounds by users. Facebook did provide users with a rich set of tools to expose or limit data to certain people alone: people in certain networks or friends.

The Facebook at first launched at Harvard University, where the founders of Facebook used it to encourage the classmates to get to know better each other. In many colleges in that time printed facebooks were provided in order to include student’s areas of study, interests, biographical information, and so on. Later on the company extended to other universities, colleges, and high schools, and in the end to major corporations prior to releasing it to the general public in the end of 2006.