A pixel-art museum room at night: chat windows on chunky monitors, a webcam, an MP3 player and a flip phone in a glass case, and BRB and Away signs on the walls.

Buddy lists, away messages and profile pages with far too many sparkles. This wing remembers the years when everyone you knew was online at once, and the web became somewhere you went to meet your friends.

  • NEW!

    TheFacebook: the 2004 version

    In 2004 Facebook was thefacebook.com: Harvard first, plain and blue, with a poke nobody could explain. What it looked like, and how it grew.

  • NEW!

    What happened to Bebo?

    AOL paid $850m for Bebo in 2008; its founder bought it back for $1m. How the UK's favourite social network lived, died and came back, again and again.

  • NEW!

    What happened to MSN Messenger?

    MSN Messenger closed in 2013, when Microsoft moved its users to Skype. The story of the nudge, the wink and a very long goodbye.

  • NEW!

    What happened to MySpace?

    MySpace never closed. It lost to Facebook, sold for $35m in 2011, then lost years of music in a server move. Tom, the Top 8 and the songs that vanished.

From the museum

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