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Email was the original social network (still left).

By that definition, the telegraph was the original social network, preceding emails by over a hundred years.

The definition of social networking is debatable, but I don't think one that encompasses every communication medium is useful.

I would say that communications media that addresses based on an individual's identity, and has infrastructure for public and pseudo public group communication counts. Email + listserv counts, IMO, whereas your example of telegraphs would not.

You could probably implement a social network on top of TELEX if your we're feeling ascetic though.

Nah, the PSTN was the original social network. And they even developed the first cloud app: voicemail.

Email's older than voice mail.

Fair enough, though I wouldn't call it a "cloud" application until webmail became prominent in the late 90s.

Why? You'd log in to servers that were more or less permanently on and connected to public internet in order to access email for the length of it's existence.

Sorry, smoke signals were the first social network. Plus you couldn't even opt out of them.

They weren't even push in a way. You had to manually pull the messages. So I don't think there's a question of opt out. :)

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