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Surely it depends how you define social media - I'd expect to see features like having a list of connections/"friends", ability to share messages to said group, and arguably that should include more than just plain text content. Six degrees (1997) was about the earliest, and Friendster then MySpace the first that became "viral" (not a word used back then!). Were there ever any genuine non-web social media platforms?

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You’re correct, but I expect that the need to invent those features arose with limitations in existing systems (those that were just plain text content or non-web, as you say).

Good point. AOL was huge in the late 90s and I used to to connect with a bunch of people in my locality who I never met in irl and a couple people I met up with romantically. But there was no human network - just chat rooms people were either in or out of.

In my experience social networking began with Friendster, where artifacts of your network were key to they experience. But this was preceded by web-based discussion and link sharing sites like kuro5hin and metafilter, where your profile and the viewable history of your comments and interactions with other users represented you to others.

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