Today, Facebook is 10 years old. On Feb. 4, 2004, thefacebook.com opened for business, a comparatively simpler, smaller site that allowed college kids to have digital social lives.
happy 10th birthday facebook! is there a place where i can write on your wall and pretend to have had a relationship with you since college
— Amanda Lucci (@alucci) February 4, 2014
And it’s really, really different now. Sometimes horrifyingly so, because the ways in which we used to talk and interact were conditioned to a certain type of environment (for me, my Facebook environment was somewhere between day drinking on a couch on a lawn and a high school sleepover), and then that environment totally changed the scene on us (now, I’d say my Facebook environment is like a wine and cheese party at which I know five people).
Unfortunately, much of what we did and said and posted way back when is very easy to find. In the spirit of celebrating the Almighty Social Network’s decade, we’re revisiting all of these things the much younger, dumber, simpler versions of ourselves thought were worth posting.
Turns out, none of us really understood Facebook, or why we were joining it… or whether we were supposed to speak in the third person once the status update box came around. And apparently some of us (me) were especially bad at using a scanner.
Worse yet, of course, are our first profile pictures.
Happy birthday, Facebook. And thanks (but no thanks) for these memories.
Illustration by Jason Reed
