What free social networking sites did you use back in the day?

cerebus

Friendsreunited and faceparty, MSN messenger for chat, yahoo groups

Nelliegrace

Church, Local library, Mum’s and Toddlers’ Group, coffee with local friends, Playgroup committee,  School gate chat, Telephone, (short calls after 6pm for the cheaper rate,) writing letters. 
We shared a lot of useful information, received or passed on children’s clothes, toys, books, etc. and had a lot of support and encouragement. 

forgotmyname

Does it make me REALLY OLD when people mention back in the day and Myspace/Bebo etc. and I think if that's back in the
day what would they call everything else that came before that?

AOL was huge before all that and smaller offerings before that. But AOL gave me free internet and a regular supply of freebies.
Free weekends at some posh hotels. They paid the £200 ADSL installation fee when a guy had to come and install it.

It was a shock having to pay for the internet because Carphone Warehouse bought AOL and AOL went downhill fast.
I had to goto O2 for my internet and they wanted this strange thing called paying with money?  Not a clue what that was
but I could not afford as many takeaways afterwards. 

Wonder what an AOL branded picnic hamper is worth, found recently having totally forgotten we had one, should have a
watch somewhere also. AOL dressing gown still in good condition. And lots of badges.

Oh yes and their free text messages, they had a deal with a company not in the UK to send text message for a silly low sum
but the UK phone companies were not happy because they still had to deliver the texts and didn't get their slice.

How was that for money saving?

Neil_Jones

forgotmyname said:

AOL was huge before all that and smaller offerings before that. But AOL gave me free internet and a regular supply of freebies.
Free weekends at some posh hotels. They paid the £200 ADSL installation fee when a guy had to come and install it.

It was a shock having to pay for the internet because Carphone Warehouse bought AOL and AOL went downhill fast.

Before Freeserve broke the mould in the late 1990s, internet access was a double edged sword.

You see, children, you used to go on the internet, and you would not only pay for the calls, but you'd also have to pay the provider as well separately.  This was the case with AOL and also Compuserve (and maybe a few others).  AOL's marketing was ridiculously aggressive and you received free AOL CDs each time you bought, well anything basically offering you 100 free hours a month or some other offer.

When Freeserve came along they set the standard - you just pay for the calls to get online (in the dial-up days) and it was PAYG so you paid through your phone bill, which is how the company made money (that and adverts all over the place, ad-block not being a thing for at least a while to come.

As broadband took over that PAYG model fell away and now we have ridiculous speeds, we're connected 24/7 and we probably pay less per month now than you probably would have done had you tied up a phone line 24/7 at local call rates.

forgotmyname

Yeah the AOL CD's got stupid, every supermarket had a pile at the tills with 10's, 100's and I think there was even one for 1000 hours free
in one month?  Some users had the free trials for years.

AOL + Phone calls at ?p per minute then they started a 1p per minute with a special number to call and then onto a freephone
number before broadband became available. So many ideas and websites came and went.

Current fixed price unlimited is way cheaper, wonder what their idea of unlimited is now though?  I had an O2 rep call me and tell me
that there is unlimited and their is taking the P...

Neil_Jones

Well the AOL marketing campaign might have been aggressive, but it clearly worked or had some other impact, as people do collect those disks, such was the amount they made (apparently over half of all CDs made in the 90s had AOL stamped on them).  Perhaps we shouldn't have used them all as bird scarers

Though it was ironic really in the UK at least because that arm was ultimately bought off them.  So they built all that user base up through the aggressive marketing - and the Carphone Warehouse reaped the rewards and just had to hand over a couple of hundred million and there's an user base ready to migrate, ultimately to TalkTalk.  AOL doesn't exist any more in the UK apart from a legacy customer base.

libra10

Back in the day, we used to use newsgroups.
Members shared information about various topics, it was quite successful at the time.

forgotmyname

AOL bosses said if the UK get 1 million subscribers they would take everyone to Disneyland probably thinking that
would never happen.

Well it did and silence about it until they said the next bash would be at DisneyLand Paris.  Not quite the same but
it was free.

Floss

I met my ex-husband in 2003 on Faceparty. His new wife found him on LinkedIn in 2018.

Bonnypitlad

My social networking was to write letters, or visit or telephone friends or relatives from a public call box. I’m still impressed by being able to speak to someone hundreds of miles away, especially when there’s no “wires”attached 
My local free rag has a column written by a” bubbly” young mother who thinks I’d be interested in what her children had for breakfast and how many drinks she had on her night out with the girls. It is “Facebook for Luddites”