In the early '00s, most people I knew were using LiveJournal, Xanga, or Blogspot (with MySpace having a short-lived burst of popularity in the mid-00s). And bac

In the early '00s, most people I knew were using LiveJournal, Xanga, or Blogspot (with MySpace having a short-lived burst of popularity in the mid-00s). And back in the '90s, people were using free webhosts like GeoCities, Xoom, Crosswinds, etc. It's not like Facebook came out of nowhere and invented the concept of a free platform to publish your musings. No, Facebook is popular because it's more convenient than any of the free services I mentioned in the above paragraph. Facebook provides not just hosting but a fully-set-up CMS with no configuration necessary or even allowed (a selling point back in the day when people were complaining about MySpace's unreadable themes with annoying autoplaying music), social networking to connect you with your friends, advanced data mining and machine learning features to make sure you're matched up with the content you want to see, an IM service built into the platform, etc.