The top submission actually ends up being a surprisingly good guide to what was going on with the internet circa 2005

https://web.archive.org/web/20060313005123/http://www.paulgr...

An interesting point is that the non-techies who initially used the internet socially were mostly teens and young adults on sites like MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. (and IM services like AIM -- essentially like Google Chat) If you want to see what MySpace was, I suppose tagged.com is the nearest modern equivalent?