Social Networking Websites Aren't What They Used to Be

By Michael Haas

I'm old enough to remember when there weren't such a thing as 'myspaces' 'podcasts' 'facebooks' and other 'social networking websites.' I still remember the day I found out about The Facebook. My friend came up to me and said, 'Haas, you have to join this thing online, it's great.' When I asked why it's great, she couldn't really explain it, but she managed to say enough to make me believe that it would be something great someday. Actually, it sounded really lame. I mean think about it - how would you describe facebook to someone who had never heard of it without making it and you sound stupid? And it actually was pretty lame those first few months.

You see, waaayy back in late 2004, facebook wasn't open to anyone with an email address. It was only open to a college students who could prove they were such by providing the assigned school email address. I think the 'U' was pretty much the only school in Minnesota to have access to facebook. They didn't have all these wacky work, city and 'no' networks. It was just a handful of the biggest colleges and universities around the country.

Alright, this seems to be devolving into a "I joined facebook way earlier than anyone so I'm better than you" type story. When in reality, I just wanted to point out the differences between the facebook of 2007 and the facebook of 2005. There have been many changes, important ones that have affected many lives, but it's boring and not fun to write about facebook changes over the years. I'll leave it at this: facebook was lame, then really cool, then lame, and now it's kinda cool, all things considered. Elaborate? Okay, fine.


Lame - back when it was only open to a few schools and nobody at the 'U' knew if people had it or if it were going to catch on or if they felt comfortable adding people as 'friends.' This was back before a person could have more than one picture on their profile - nowadays most girls have like 15 albums and about 800 pictures tagged of themselves. There was no event invitations or stuff like that. It was just a picture, a wall (in fact, I don't even remember if the wall existed at the beginning, because I don't think anyone wrote on them. It was just a picture, a wall and messaging. Nobody even used the wall so it was basically just email with a picture, so it was essentially stalker net (in-house online directory most schools have.) Except the poke feature. I would say that without the poke feature, facebook would not be what it is today. When talking about facebook back then, we just talked about poking people. It turned a lot of people on and a lot of people off. thefacebook front page circa October 2004 (University of Minnesota was just added)
Really Cool - After six months of lameness on facebook, things began to escalate quickly. It finally became what it's bare essential quality and purpose was: connecting people. And to do that, they rapidly began adding schools their network. pretty cool: Many more of my friends joined facebook, and it became more socially acceptable for everyone to start requesting friendship with everyone. Everyone was joining, and everyone became friends with everyone. Freshmen were told during their orientation to join facebook. It was quite the revolution. In the fall of 2005, users were allowed to add pictures, and 'tag' their friends in the photos - an underrated facet, especially for people like me who still haven't added any non-profile pictures. It added a whole 'nother level to the facebook experience, especially for us guys, especially around halloween.

facebook (they dropped the "the") front page in 2005

Lame Again - somewhere along the line, facebooks novelty began to wear off, and I'm not sure people used it as much. At least I didn't. People weren't joining at the same clip, and Zuckerburg wasn't doing much to improve the function or ingenuity of the site. It was still the choice for checking in on people (relationship status) setting up events and poking, but it was fairly status-quo. Then they added the 'newsfeed' which caused quite a bit of uproar. The group 'official petition to facebook to stop newsfeed' had a million people in it within days, with the help, ironically, of newsfeed. the site received considerable nationwide publicity for the incident, which i think opened the eyes of many users, like me, to the fact that facebook was a major website which many people cared deeply about. newsfeed made some changes and eventually became essential to the facebook experience.

facebook's front page today (2007).
It finally acheived it's coolness tag again when...

Cool Again - Allison B. joined facebook.