Before We Called It Social

The Work Before the Name

In 1999, the internet didn’t feel like a place where people lived. It felt like somewhere you went.

You opened a browser. You arrived. You left.

Nothing followed you. Nothing stayed. There was no sense that anything would carry forward into the next session, or the one after that.

We didn’t have language for identity online. Not in the way we do now. No one was talking about presence, or continuity, or what it meant to exist alongside other people in a shared digital space.

At the time, I was working as a principal designer on SuperGroups, including SuperFamily.com and SuperFamilia.com. A small team. Close work. We were trying to shape something we couldn’t fully name.

We weren’t chasing a category.

We were trying to make something feel real.

The question we kept circling wasn’t complicated. It just didn’t have a clean answer:

What would it look like if people didn’t just visit the internet, but remained there, together?

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Before the Internet Became the Internet

It’s easy to project today’s internet backward. It didn’t look like this.

Most people in the U.S. hadn’t fully adopted the open web. The experience was inconsistent. Slow. Fragmented depending on how you got there.

Closed systems still dominated. AOL. CompuServe. You logged in, stayed inside, logged out when you were done.

The open web existed, but it behaved differently. GeoCities gave people a place to exist, but it was mostly static. Often anonymous. You could build a page, decorate it, leave something behind.

There was no expectation you would return.

Or that anyone else would.

Continuity was thin. Shared presence was thinner. You weren’t somewhere with someone. You were either inside a system or alone on a page.

That environment shaped expectations, whether people realized it or not.

SuperGroups assumed something else.

It assumed people would come back. That relationships would persist. That continuity would matter more than novelty once the medium caught up.

Those assumptions were right.

They were just early.

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The Line We Drew

One decision, early on, matters more than the rest.

We chose not to design for the world. We chose to design for each other.

The system centered on one-to-one and one-to-many interaction within defined groups. It resisted random audiences. It avoided anything that felt like broadcast.

You weren’t performing for strangers. You weren’t speaking into an undefined crowd.

At the time, it felt like restraint.

Looking back, it was something else.

People behave differently when they are known.

A private, relationship-centered network felt safer. More grounded. More honest. It also made sense as a product, even if the market hadn’t caught up.

That single choice changed the environment.

Identity carried context. Interaction accumulated into memory. The system started to feel less like a destination and more like a place.

In hindsight, it’s a fork you can see clearly.

We couldn’t see it then.

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When It Became Real

At some point, this stopped being theoretical.

We began working with the United States Department of Defense on a version of SuperFamily for families of deployed service members.

Everything tightened.

This wasn’t about features anymore. It was about connection under strain. Clarity wasn’t optional. Trust wasn’t optional.

People needed to stay in touch without noise. They needed to trust who they were speaking to. They needed continuity across distance and uncertainty.

A broadcast system would have failed there.

It would have introduced exposure where privacy was required. It would have diluted meaning at the exact moment it mattered most.

What we were building held.

At least in principle.

It clarified something we had only felt before:

Privacy is not a setting.

It’s a condition for trust.

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The Path Forward, and the Path Taken

A few years later, I found myself inside a system that brought these ideas into public view.

At Friendster, the unit shifted from group to individual. The question didn’t change.

How do you create a network where people are not just visible, but connected in a way that feels real?

It felt, in some ways, like a networked GeoCities. The difference was the unit.

Not a page.

A person.

Identity became the anchor. The system mapped relationships between individuals instead of organizing them inside predefined groups.

Friend graphs started to take shape. Not as a feature, but as structure. You could see how you were connected to someone. Shared friends. School. Proximity.

The system encouraged interaction, but it still held a boundary.

It wasn’t designed for everyone.

It was designed for people you might actually know.

That constraint mattered.

It kept behavior closer to reality. It limited the distance between identity and action. For a while, it felt like connection still carried context.

Then scale showed up.

Boundaries softened. Distance increased. Interaction drifted toward visibility.

That shift introduced something we now recognize immediately:

The tension between connection and performance.

The system wasn’t just mapping relationships anymore.

It was shaping behavior.

There’s a line you can trace through those systems now.

SuperFamily organized around the family.

Friendster shifted to the individual.

MySpace expanded expression. Identity became more performative.

Facebook moved the center of gravity to the feed. What you said began to matter more than who you were.

At each step, reach expanded.

At each step, the distance between identity and behavior widened.

We didn’t call it a tradeoff then.

It was.

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What Stayed With Me

That early work never left. It just changed form.

The same questions kept returning.

How does identity stay meaningful as complexity increases?

How does interaction stay clear under pressure?

How do you preserve signal when everything is accelerating?

In enterprise systems, it showed up as decision clarity.

In financial systems, as trust and accountability.

In AI systems, it shows up as interpretability and control.

The environment changes.

The constraint doesn’t.

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Now

Today, the internet doesn’t struggle to connect people.

It struggles to stay coherent.

You see it in misinformation. In fragmentation. In the slow erosion of shared reality.

You see it in systems that optimize for engagement without regard for meaning.

You see it in AI systems generating language without grounding or context.

The technology is new.

The pattern isn’t.

We’ve seen what happens when systems optimize for reach instead of relationship. When identity becomes performance instead of something lived. When signal is left unprotected.

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Before, and After

In 1999, we were building something we didn’t yet have words for.

We weren’t early because we predicted the future.

We were early because we stayed close to the human problem.

People want to be known.

They want to return.

They want to trust what they’re part of.

That was true then.

It’s still true now.

The difference is scale.

The question is no longer whether we can connect people.

We already have.

The question now is whether the systems we build are worthy of that connection.