American Expatriate Costa Rica

Misviejosamigos.co.cr: The Costa Rican social network that existed before Facebook and MySpace

In 1971 the first email was sent and for many people, that was the day the social networks were born.

22 years later MySpace was created and a year later, in 2004, Facebook was born. The now-defunct Hi5 also emerged at that time.

But before all of them, there was a Costa Rican social network that in a month managed to register 5,000 people. On August 29th, 2001, systems engineer Esteban Mora Cyrman founded misviejosamigos.co.c,. a site that was ahead the idea of Marck Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and now owner of Instagram.

The goal was simple: to get in touch with former school and college friends in Costa Rica. And it was done very easily. Each person registered in a school and was grouped within a generation (if its generation did not exist, the system created it), “

explained the engineer.

Former students of Mauro Fernández University in Tibás were the first users to support the idea. By 2002, 80,000 Costa Ricans were part of Mora’s experimental idea.

We could almost say that being connected to the Internet in those years was a luxury. There were many. registered people who lived abroad,”

added Mora.

Currently, misviejosamigos.co.cr is still active, but the traffic in the web site is minimal. Although its founder has rewritten it for a possible relaunch, he question himself: what can I offer that the big social networks are not already offering?

crhoy.com