Did you know that before Facebook or MySpace – and even before Friendster – there was a social network called Friends Reunited? I didn’t. An infographic from MarketingDirecto.com contains this and other fact from over 30 years of online social networking. Do you think we would have published this infographic if it started in 2004? No. So to focus full attention on the infographic, they did the first thing right with a rather unique approach by starting the timeline in 1978.

The timeline below goes all the way back to 1978, when Ward Christensen and Randy Suess created the first computerized bulletin board system (CBBS) to make announcements and plan meetups with friends. It continues and ends with the Facebook IPO in 2012. We think that many of the milestones you find below will sound familiar to you, but hey, just take a lookt. The facts where this infographic is based upon, can be found in Spanish at Marktingdirecto.