Nostalgia. Just realized I have graduated from college for 10 years now. fb was the hottest thing my senior year. good old days of writing stuff on ppl's wall. The "relationship status" thing was so cool specially when selecting "It's complicated". The best part was feeling part of a special group because we all had to use .edu email to register. I remember I graduated and immediately asked my friend who was still in college for his .edu email because I obviously didn't want to give up my account. How far have we come since then.
Does anyone else remember the free-for-all that fb "walls" used to be?
People would leave comments there and it was all infinitely editable so you could just go in & edit whatever comment your friend left & make it look like they had said something ridiculous.
Changing the wall to something more similar to its current form was the first big "change" that I remember people complaining to FB about.
> With almost half the world’s Internet-connected population using the service, the company is facing the immutable law of large numbers and simply can’t keep adding users at its previously torrid rate.
Pretty sure this journalist does not have a correct understanding of what the law of large numbers is.
Very infuriating, even though I tend to find Businessweek's articles to be usually quite informative.
Facebook messenger is indeed clever. I recognized Facebook as addictive, and blocked it. But people still communicate with me on there, so I installed the messenger app.
So I'm still in the ecosystem. And when I message someone, I draw them in. FB messenger keeps me from sending messages by email, text, whatever other method.
I frequently prefer FB Messenger because it is both desktop (web) and mobile, and it handles media. There are other cross-platform messaging services like Google Hangouts (GChat/GTalk), but I still can't attach a photo. Or there are ones like WhatsApp that focus on mobile, and are missing desktop/web. Apple iMessage is good, but it's only usable on iOS devices, which is not always what I'm using. And other cross-platform messaging products don't really have much adoption.
Never realised Facebook was turning 10. It made me realise how many years 'Facebook is dead articles' have been around with no indication it's even dying, kind of put them in perspective.
People that started using Facebook as teenagers are now adults - and teenagers generally don't want to use the same service as their parents. So they probably aren't losing users, just not gaining them in one demographic anymore. However, consider Instagram. It's probably mostly used by teenagers and Facebook owns it.
For those that were around during its initial release, it would be great if you could share your thoughts on why/how FB became so popular. Exclusivity? Seeding/inviting the site to social/popular people (like in The Social Network)? Simple UI? No ads? Another reason? Or just a little bit of everything?
Facebook used to just be a profile system. You put up information about yourself and hoped other people would look at it. People could write on your wall (timeline now) and you could write on theirs.
People at your university and your friends could see your profile. Nobody else could.
I remember spending hours looking at other peoples profiles. They're a computer science major? I'm a computer science major. What kind of music do they like? WOW this is interesting.
They also had this really fascinating "How you're connected" feature which would give you a list of friends that connected you to that person. You could pick almost any random person at the school (I went to a school with almost 40,000 students) and you would almost always be connected to them through your friends.
MySpace, while offering many similar features, was annoying to use. Oh great, white text on a yellow background and emo music blasting on page load. It got to a point where I wouldn't ever click my friend's MySpace pages because I just knew it was going to be terrible.
The exclusivity of it to college students was cool too. My friends at schools that didn't have facebook yet would be jealous of all the cool connections and groups we made on facebook that they couldn't do. Then, when it rolled out to their campus, they would do the same.
For me, it was definitely the exclusivity and the timing. MySpace was big, and it was cool for communicating and reconnecting but it still felt like a "kids place" to some extent. Many of my buddies from college were signed up to this and recommended it to me. I signed up and started being more active on it.
It wasn't so much that it was only exclusive to people attending college, but just that it was not overrun by spazzy kids and animated gifs (at the time).
I got both at the same time, in fall 2005. I guess I'm a late adopter, but I remember having to be invited to Gmail. Facebook I just heard about from another friend in college around the same time.
