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

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.