In the mid-1990s, a computer programmer from New York launched a simple website called Tripod with the basic idea of giving people a way to keep in touch through their personal homepages. When he couldn't find an affordable web host for his project, he bought one himself and set up shop with nothing but a few lines of code and a basic HTML template. The site soon became immensely popular among college students across the country, and by 1998 it had been memorialized as "the most influential social media site" of all time.
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