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Friday 5 January 2018

The Evolution of Facebook


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Mark Zuckerberg came out today saying his New Years Resolution is to "fix Facebook", because it's apparently gotten too off the rails with fake news. What a serendipitous time to debut my mini blog series, "Remember When: The Evolution of Social Media." Today we'll focus on Facebook.

Facebook is the most popular social media site, according to like, studies or something. However, it was at one point second most popular, next to MySpace. I got Facebook in 2007, right around the time it switched. What a different time it was!

Facebook used to be all about your friends. They would post statuses and photos, which you could "like". The status bar was locked at "Vince Guglielmi is _______." So, if you wanted ice cream, you had to write "Vince Guglielmi is hungry for ice cream" as opposed to "Vince Guglielmi wants ice cream." Or you could write on your friend's wall and be like "wanna get some ice cream?" Yeah. People used to write on each other's walls. Crazy.

A screenshot from 2007 Facebook.

Business was different too. Pages didn't exist yet, so advertising was much harder. People would create fan groups for their brands/artists/whatever. Fans even ran those groups sometimes. In order to see anything from a group page, you had to be a member of the group. Sharing didn't exist in any capacity.

Filling out your profile used to be a big deal, especially the relationship status part. There were a few options; Single, in a Relationship, Married, and 'it's Complicated'. Imagine hitting someone with the "it's complicated" request? What a savage maneuver. You could also fill out info about your favourite bands, movies and books, which people would spend hours doing.


Facebook gradually started changing, adding third-party apps, chat functions, and pages. Apps were nuts. They used to have all sorts of extra stuff like "pick five lists" where you could like "create your 5-member dream band", and it would show up in your friend's feeds. There were also Buzzfeed-style quizzes for days. Facebook eventually dismantled the ensuing cluster-f***, but not before harvesting all our information, I'm sure.

Fan groups slowly got replaced by Pages, which wasn't a big deal at the time, because most companies weren't smart enough to make fan groups anyways. Looking back, though, Pages were a really big change in Facebook's advertising and community engagement capabilities. At one point, Facebook took the bands and movies people said they liked on their profiles and instantly made people fans of the pages. Savage.

Nowadays, Facebook looks more like a classifieds section than a reflection of anything your friends are doing. People used to post full photo albums of every party they went to, now they share their one curated Instagram post from the party and that's it. When's the last time you wrote on someone's wall, except for on their birthday? In a business sense, the new algorithm seems to have made it easier to buy your way to the top. Facebook isn't even trying to hide that fact. They were practically begging me for four bucks, to boost my post, today. I know you're a publicly traded company with families to feed and all, but like, chill out man.


Despite my whining, I still go on Facebook multiple times a day, as do many other people in this world. The company has created a brand as ubiquitous as Nike and Coca Cola, and I have a hard time believing Facebook will disappear in my lifetime.

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