Friendster

Friendster (2003) Speaking of making friends on the Internet, along came Friendster. Yes, it's weird to call an existing service a Web fad, but Friendster qualifies. Within two years of launch, Friendster was logging 60 million page views per day--and in fact, got so slow it was nearly unusable. But the idea of being somehow connected to everyone else online proved irresistible, and social networking remains, arguably, still a fad (if an "unproven but wildly popular business model" counts as a fad).