Some of the most popular social networks a decade ago are barely in use today, if at all. Remember Friendster? No? Too young?

Let's take a moment to reminisce about the friends we once had... before we found better ones.

Friendster

Founded in 2002 in Mountain View, California – home now to the likes of Google and LinkedIn – Friendster is generally seen as the first mainstream social media network, even though Sixdegrees.com came before it.

Friendster clocked up 3 million users in its first three months. In 2003, it rebuffed a $US30 million offer from Google.

Just two years after its launch however, Friendster was on the nose as MySpace, with its customisable profile pages, overtook it in terms of page views.

Friendster shut down its social accounts in 2011, but it isn't dead, exactly. Like a Phoenix, it relaunched in 2011 as a social gaming platform and is very popular in South-East Asia. You can log in with your Facebook account.

MySpace

Once one of the most popular websites in the world, hanging out on MySpace was a favourite pastime of teens and music fans across the globe.

It was launched in 2003 and quickly surpassed Friendster as the social network of choice.

Part of its appeal was the ability to customise home pages, really driving home the idea that a social network is a place to express one's identity.

Its format, which included the ability to add playlists, also lent itself well to musicians wanting to promote their work and connect with fans.

But by 2008, MySpace's heyday had ended as rival Facebook overtook it in popularity.

MySpace has undergone more revamps than Courtney Love in a bid to claw back users. Not even superstar Justin Timberlake, who bought into the company in 2011, has been able to restore it to its former glory. These days it looks more like a music catalogue than a social network.

Bebo

Bebo came onto the scene in 2005, founded by British couple Michael and Xochi Birch. Users could post blogs, photographs, music, videos and questionnaires.

At one point it was the third most popular social network in the world, and was snapped up by AOL in 2008 for $US850 million.

But like its predecessors, Bebo's popularity began to decline as the Facebook juggernaut grew. Last year, the husband and wife team bought it back for just $US1 million.

The pair is in the process of relaunching the Bebo brand with three smartphone apps. The first, Blab, is a video chat app.

The new Bebo may never achieve the popularity of the old one, but that's probably of little concern to its founders and their tidy $US849 million profit.

Diaspora

Seeking an alternative to the corporatism of other social networks, four university students in New York founded Diaspora in 2010.

It's a non-profit social network based on three key principles: decentralisation of data from any one organisation; the freedom to be whoever you want to be online; and privacy, with all personal data remaining the property of users.

It sounds great in theory but a clunky user experience prevented Diaspora from ever reaching critical mass. Even signing up feels like a rigmarole compared to other networks that just ask you for your email address.

Diaspora had somewhere upwards of 24,739 active users in the last month, although its decentralisation makes it hard to tally all users accurately.

Ello, only launched last month and with similar aims, said it was receiving around 30,000 requests to join its network every hour.

Google+

The world's number one website launched into the social media universe in 2011, but it never really took off in the way that Facebook or Twitter did, despite the incredible brand power behind it.

Many have referred to Google+ as a ghost town: users are signing up, but they're not doing much there. Even Google's own employees aren't particularly active on it.

The disparity stems from the fact that many Google+ users are users by default. Until last month, anyone who signed up to Google's email service, Gmail, was automatically given a Google+ account as well. For people with multiple Gmail accounts – say, one for home, and one for work – that means multiple Google+ accounts, thereby inflating user numbers.

But whether or not Google+ is a success or a flop depends on what you expect a social network to do.

As Ello points out in its manifesto, users are products. Google+ is a great way for Google to connect various data about users across multiple services, including Gmail, YouTube, news, maps and more.

In other words, it's a great database for Google, even if not such a great place to hang out.