I recall sixdegrees. I was invited to it by the same person who got me to sign up classmates.com and Friendster. As far as websites with useful social networki

I recall sixdegrees. I was invited to it by the same person who got me to sign up classmates.com and Friendster. As far as websites with useful social networking functionality that resembles what we have today, I would say the PHPbb/vBulletin style forums were there early on. Sometime around 1999, I joined a forum on ezboard.com(1) which ended up turning into a long running discussion and meeting site. It was moved to a private server after ezboard transitioned in some way and deleted everyone's content circa 2003. It was the most prominent online resource in our artist community until it was replaced by Facebook and then Instagram. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard