Facebook on Thursday announced that it was launching “Campus,” a college-only part of the platform aimed at connecting students with one another and having an online community among people on various college campuses.
If that sounds oddly familiar, you’re not the only person who thinks so.
Facebook launched in 2004 (originally as TheFacebook) as a social network for college students on various campuses. You needed a college email address to sign up for the platform, and you could connect with people in similar classes.
So basically the same thing they launched on Thursday.
The social media giant acknowledged the similarities in its announcement on Thursday.
“In the early days, Facebook was a college-only network, and now we’re returning to our roots with Facebook Campus to help students make and maintain these relationships, even if they’re away from their college,” Charmaine Hung, the product manager for Facebook Campus, wrote in a blog post.
The new feature will have a campus-only newsfeed, a campus directory, and chat rooms for dorms or other groups. The new Campus feature also requires a college email address to join. The company also detailed the privacy options for the new feature.
Facebook has grown from a college-centric social media platform to a tech behemoth over the past 16 years, but the idea that it was launching a new service to do exactly what it was originally created as caught the attention of a lot of people.
Maybe soon there will be a legal battle over the precise origins of Campus, explosive growth, an open question about its role in elections, and calls for it to be broken apart.
