LunarStorm
The Swedish community an entire generation of teenagers lived inside during the first half of the 2000s, built years before the phrase social network existed.
The service started as StajlPlejs in 1996, built by Rickard Eriksson, and relaunched as LunarStorm in February 2000. The vocabulary was entirely its own: your krypin was your profile page, the guestbook was where socialising actually happened, the friend list was your friends, and you could see who had stopped by to look — a feature whose social explosiveness today's platforms carefully avoid. At its peak a very large share of all Swedish fifteen- to twenty-year-olds were members, which in practice made participation compulsory. What killed it was not a failure but Facebook, offering the same thing with real names and no upper age limit. The site closed in 2010. It gets mentioned regularly in international contexts as one of the world's earliest social networks, something Swedish media history is remarkably bad at remembering.