It’s hard to imagine a world where we can’t rant about how much we hate Facebook, but not too long ago, it didn’t exist.

Before the early 2000s, tracking down an old friend often meant hiring a private detective. Now you just type their name into the social network and stalk them for a bit, before hitting the ‘friend request’ button.

Of course, Facebook wasn’t even the OG network. Remember when everyone had a Myspace account?

Then there’s Reddit, Instagram, WeChat… the list seems endless.

That’s why TNW decided to make sense of the chaos by creating a bar chart race to figure out how social networks have changed and gained in popularity over time:

The video above was created using data from 16 years of annual (or quarterly) reports of companies that made their numbers public.

I had no idea how old LinkedIn is.

I also have no idea what Google Buzz is, but it was apparently in the top three for a year or two.

The crazy thing is that things are moving so fast, the above bar graph race will probably be out of date in a matter of months.

[source:tnw]