For how long have you been active on at least one socially interactive website?

Unless you count this one, and Facebook, no answer. Although I have joined other social sites for the last ten years, they either got shut down or kicked me out. XD Fluther is gonna be almost two years, and FB a bit more, but I barely do anything on there.

Aaaah…reminds me of all my Final Fantasy forums and message boards from back in the day. :D

I was at Askville for about 1.5yrs before joining here.

The longest I’ve been on one site is eBay. I’ve been a member since 2001. (no comments, but I have ratings going back that far ;)

I started playing an online video game at 17, and I was very active chatting on there, then I went to the video game forums which had general forums separate from the talk about the video game, then went to regular forums and Q&A sites.

Facebook is like six months, this for three or perhaps more. I’m not the biggest fan of social media in the world. I religiously avoided Facebook for the longest time

What I meant to ask was, what was the first socially interactive website that you joined and how long ago was that?

@Brian1946 It was probably Killingifrit and Blue Gartr, forums for the video game Final Fantasy 11.

Fluther was my first. It will be 3 years for me this December.

@Brian1946 Aaaah.

Mine was in my last years of school, where I used the school computers during lunch or after school, to explore this strange thing called the Internet lol.
I found this site called ’‘The Belly’’, which was basically just a big chat room, and you could go off into smaller chat rooms with selected groups of people. I met this girl there named Beth. Final Fantasy VIII was coming out, and that’s all we could talk about since we were hopeless fangirls. We became good friends though, at least through online standards, especially for back then. Didn’t last too long, but we did send one another letters through the mail for a bit. It was pretty cool.
The site also had minigames that you could play, and users would play against one another. One I remember was Tank Wars, where Beth and I got totally wasted, constantly and all the time. XD

That was ten years ago, give or take. Prolly a little more, like 1998 or 1999.

Do chat rooms count? I’m pretty sure I was chillin’ in AOL chat rooms in middle school in 98 or 99. Joined live journal in 02. Joined FB in 04 or 05. Myspace before that. Before those and after AOL i hung out in MSN forums and game rooms alot…. Gosh ive spent too much of my life online…......

Not sure. I’ve been on social websites since around 1987. The first one I remember participating in a lot was called Dragonsnest, and I accessed it through Fidonet. But there were a dozen other BBS host sites that I participated in then. They were very different then, but they were just as social.

@wundayatta Wait what, 87? Dude, how long has the internet existed for? Wow that’s messed up lol, I thought it was a mid nineties thing? Man I’m all confused.

@Symbeline Fidonet started in 1984. According to Wikipedia, FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet. The network continues to operate but has shrunk considerably, primarily due to the closing of many BBSes during the increase of popularity of the Internet.

@Symbeline dude went to school with Al Gore. just sayin’ :P

Yo @jonsblond That information is classified. You said you wouldn’t tell! Make sure you don’t tell them my role in the invention. I’ll have to have you extradited to the Orange Tree if you do! :-P

@wundayatta sorry. I wasn’t was inhaling with Clinton. oops

Dude??? Clinton???? Yech. I’m feeling slightly nauseous now. Blech! Yuck!

I was active in photography and cycling listservs in the mid 90s.

Those weren’t web sites, but I would say the function was equivalent.

In the early 90s I would log onto BBSs like @wundayatta, but it required tying up the phone line and paying by the minute, so the activity was limited.

When I joined Fluther in Dec. of 2006, I took the vow to love, honor and be faithful. And so I have. And I have never even been tempted to stray.

@jaytkay Are you European? We could stay on as long as we wanted at no cost as long as it was a local call. We had to disable call waiting if we wanted to stay online through another incoming call. I didn’t have call waiting so it didn’t matter.

Some of the BBSes were local but not quite local enough, so I had to buy a plan that put these numbers in free range of my phone. I had lists and lists of BBSes in my area. It was so interesting all the fellow travelers I found. I got into science fiction conventions and computer hobbying and ultimate frisbee and so much more, back then when it wasn’t the ordinary thing.

2008

Are you European? We could stay on as long as we wanted at no cost as long as it was a local call.

No, this was in the US. I had to watch very carefully which phone calls were free and which were metered. Maybe I had a barebones AT&T account with a very limited free calling area.

Last time I had a land-line, in 2008, it was rather expensive to call a friend on the far south side of Chicago from place on the north side.

I don’t remember what it was, or if bulletin boards count, but it would have been 1992 I think. I remember someone commending me sort of and commenting that it was unusual to have “girls” posting on the bulletin board; not that the subject matter was particularly male in nature, just that internet bulletin boards were kind of male computer nerd territory at the time, I guess.

I started using the internet on a chat room in 2005.

I began using the Internet (bulletin boards) for my baseball card store when I was about 14. That would have been around 1988 or 89. I didn’t do much chatting. I did a lot of wholesale listings, and made purchases from listings.

My husband was on BBS with his dad from the beginning. At the time his dad worked for IBM. I don’t know how long ago it was though. My husband belonged to an “Internet/Computer Club” back in the late 80’s thru the early 90’s…Their meetings were at a local pizza parlor and they’d discuss various computer geek stuff.

In 1996 ICQ was released in November, it was the first Interet wide instant messenger sevice. I have been with them since abut 2003 and Frienster soon after.

While I’ve been online for a long time, I didn’t do much but research/read, shop, and send/receive emails for most of that time. The very first interactive site I ever participated on was this one. I joined Fluther on July 21st, 2008. I’d never even been in a chatroom prior to that.

Since then I’ve tried Myspace (hated), tumblr (liked, but became too time consuming), Facebook (which I consider kind of a necessary evil), Twitter, and G+. I’m really only active here and on FB.

@augustlan I like your description of Facebook as a “necessary evil.” I am not so much into or a fan of Facebook, it’s just that a lot of my family is on Facebook and a lot of my friends are and it has enabled me to reconnect with and stay in touch with old school friends, friends from college and people from wis.dm, people who I am very fond of (or of whom I am very fond, take your pick. One of them is right, or maybe neither of them is right. :-)).

@lillycoyote Exactly. I’m not a huge fan, but it really does make staying in touch with people and what’s going on in each others lives easier. I am fond of you.

@augustlan And I am very fond of you too, of course :-) But, lest anyone get the wrong idea, I want to state, on the record, that in spite of the fondness on both sides, I know for a fact that @augustlan has modded me herself on more than a few occasions. I don’t know why exactly I feel compelled to say that but people can get kind of sensitive around here sometimes regarding certain things.

Nix that…..NO MENTIONING NAME! Rules are rules….. BAHAH BAHAHA

@Hypocrisy_Central Your comment is directed to whom? If you don’t mind my asking, that is.

Everyone who is mentioning names. I thought we went over than days ago before someone got their question yanked because it promoted the mentioning of names, or did they just rework the question….can’t remember. :-P

I do mod @lillycoyote. She loves it. ;)

@augustlan You know I love it! Particularly when you use your whip! :-)

I was a sophomore in high school and we managed to snag some login info to get into the University of Oregon’s dial-up system. I was mostly on a BBS service with a 200$ 14.4k modem I bought.

So maybe around 1992.

My first was Wis.dm. I fell into it in…..2007. Quite by accident. It was a total WTH IS THIS?? moment…but before long I was hooked for EVER!

Before that I peeked into the old, old chat rooms, like in the 90’s. The ones that caused divorces (I guess.) They kind of freaked me out. I just didn’t like the disconnect, or something. Plus I was afraid I’d wind up divorced. Although….I was already divorced. : ) But chat rooms had nothing to do with it. It was my X. all the way!