IRC-Galleria

IRC-Galleria (irc-galleria.net) is a Finnish social networking service founded in 2000 and an early giant of domestic social media. Tomi Lintelä and Jari "Jaffa" Jaanto originally founded the service for IRC users (commonly referred to as "irkkaajat"). IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text-based, real-time chat system developed by Jarkko "WiZ" Oikarinen at the University of Oulu in 1988, which quickly spread to worldwide use.

The original idea behind IRC-Galleria was to put faces to nicknames and allow people to see their chat partners in an otherwise text-based conversation. Soon, people other than IRC users also started sharing their pictures on the service, and IRC-Galleria grew to become Finland's most popular social media platform before the era of Facebook.

At the peak of its popularity in the latter half of the 2000s, the service had approximately 550,000 registered users, and it was used by an estimated 70–80 percent of 15–20-year-old Finns.