TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
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I feel like that era transpired 40 years ago. The period of time before smartphones feels like it happened in the 1970's to me.
The difference between 2000 and 2015 is so absurdly radical it begs disbelief.
Maybe we're the dinosaurs.
According to WHO, measles caused 2.6 million deaths a year before 1980, but only 134 200 in 2015. Polio dropped from 350 000 cases in 1988 to 74 in 2015.
The first movie I watched on my GearVR headset was called Strange Days, a 1995 film rather aptly about the introduction of Virtual Reality and how the government is involved in all sorts of dirty cover-ups. The movie was terribawesome, but it was amusing to see what 90's ideas of the future were getting right and wrong.
Though, the time between 1995 and 2015 is almost a whole generation, so I don't know why I'm surprised that I'm seeing the dreams of the past realised quite literally before my eyes. Does this mean I'm old, now?
The music is contrived and laughably bad, so while you might really want to imagine the profound tragedy of losing the artist while being a fan of the music, your just left with blah.
Hackers and Johnny Pnemonic (ostensibly from the same essential genre or style and period) are more fun to watch, simply because those movies don't frame the story arc as supposedly shocking and worrisome, even though they suck probably just as much.
With Strange Days, your supposed to care about something for some odd reason.
That never stopped chart-topping artists...
I actually thought the 'rapper' had some decent-power beat poetry going on, and measured up favourably against real-world artists (talk about backhanded compliments...)
If the producers were not willing to cast a known artist, and granting creative freedom to compose real music, which would then be included on the official motion picture sound track, it's assuredly contrived, although it might be appealing.
Further driving this fact home is that, the actor cast in the role did not further his career as a musician, and no one claims credit for composing authentic music. This is a telling clue that it was composed expressly as a believable, high-quality prop. The people who made it were paid specifically to craft the music to fill the space required for the plot of the movie.
Now, take authentic music from other movies, which has been composed by a career musician, which then gets used as part of a sound track years later. It comes through, as obviously good, because it's selected for its high quality, as a known quantity.
Similarly, observe career musicians that have played roles in movies. Even if their acting sucks, usually their musical contributions still shine.
When examined in this way, the cheesey nature of the prop music is evident. This sort of perception is tough to balance, when asking people to suspend disbelief for the duration of the movie. It's hard to pull someone into the world of a movie, and then ask them to be impressed by someone who is not famous, and show them a world that is moved by his music when the music isn't truly moving.
Beyond that, we weren't even permitted to become emotionally invested in the character. Even though the circumstances of his demise are villified, there's no depth to his martyrdom because we don't bond with the character. We bond with the underground experience brokering brain-hacker main character. This is where the movie falls short, with respect to the weak cover-up conspiracy theory.
Written by James Cameron and directed by his then-wife Kathryn Bigelow. It's such a great movie. And has a great track by Peter Gabriel at the end as well!
The interesting thing about it, in relation to this thread, is that they consciously tried not to extrapolate too far technologically (apart from the whole record all your experiences thing); in fact, pretty much the only noticeable advance is speech to text translation on voicemail.
Some legit stupid outfits as well. Very 90s-cool...
Compared to today's superhero movies?
And for all the joys of smartphone browsing on the go and novelty of proximity based search which doesn't involve typing postcodes, I just logged into a popular uh... people-meeting service that fundamentally hasn't changed design since earlier than 2004, and it was dated-looking then.
For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload. That's it! It was literally that boring!
Uploading a new profile pic deleted your old one, even. That being said, you could still use Facebook to contact people, if they included their phone number or AIM name, which was accessable to anyone in your college. I was contacted several times this way before Facebook chat/message/whatever else.
I remember when the "mini feed" feature was released, and all it did was list your last 5 or so activities. That was controversial.
The current Facebook shares very little resemblance to the original version, it's very, very fundamentally different from 2004 Facebook.
...yet the original version still got popular.
That being said, the first time. I heard about Facebook was one of those college publications like this one. I wish I could read it today but it was just a student publication that was printed on regular paper and put around campus every once it a while. I remember reading it and being baffled as to why it would be popular. Shortly after that the person I was dating at the time asked me to sign up. That is the only reason I did!
there was one screen where you could check on who's online, then you'd write on their wall
The wall was mostly equivalent to scrawling something in a public bathroom, hence the name.
It wasn't that late. At early as 2005, there was a form with the prompt "John Doe is:" and you had to squeeze whatever thoughts you needed your friends to know into that format.
First of all, mini-feed launched in Sep, 2006, according to a TechCrunch post from that time. That was the real time Facebook started to be anything near what it is today, and certainly well before status updates.
I first noticed people using status updates in March 2008, how do I know month and year, you ask? because there was serious shit going on on my life at the time. And I remember reading "X is blah blah blah" for the first time while I was going through my shit. It was new enough to notice. I'll conceed that the "status feature" may have existed a year before I really noticed it, so we are still at early 2007 two years earlier than 2005.
I also do recall the criticism of "you're copying Twitter" as a sibling posted.
I remember using the brand new Facebook chat about April or May 2008, FWIW.
edit: 2006, not 2016.
It's especially weird when I see people roll their eyes or laugh at someone say my grandmother's age referring to it as "the facebook", because to them its quaint and elderly, and I'm tempted to break out the "get off my lawn, that's what it has always been called" speech... Internet history is weird.
Still remember ATT Mobile in early 2001 had a "find me" service you could use to find your friends. It was like a messenger app you logged into and then it would show you where your friends were located on a google maps interface. Then you could text or chat with him.
They used the example of a guy who wins some concert tickets and wants to invite his friends that are nearby. It showed him logged in and then bringing up the messaging interface and showing three friends all within a few block radius. He sends out a group text about the tickets and they agree to meet at the bar in 15 minutes. I really thought it was a clever use of GPS and felt this was really the future of "smart" phones.
I tried to sell that shit to everybody I knew and everybody instantly freaked about their phone transmitting where they were and how it would violate their privacy, etc, etc.
I guess times have changed huh?
It's surprising Holt could still get away with writing "Cornell girls are hideous" as late as 2004!
Stanford really wasn't a concern, they're on the other coast. Though, this was from afew years after my time.
I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury. Radical industry/political reforms, striking poverty, unimaginable wealth, obscene pollution. Women's suffrage. Radio, traveling circuses and vaudeville, mass consumerism, magazines, torpedos, and a world war. Oh my!
Looking through my great-grandfather's scrapbook (he lived outside Detroit) is absolutely mind-blowing. The stuff he (and especially his father) saw are hard to put into a continuous world. His letters describing the "number of autoes" he passed on the way to visit relatives bleeds giddiness and awe.
In computer science we are similarly privileged. We've gone from basic ideas of transistors and turing machines to having a global network of interconnected supercomputers in our pockets.
And I'm saying that this is highly subjective and/or controversial.
There are tons of beautiful 80s and 90s electronics devices.
On the other hand though, I still feel like the analog computers they used back in the day are technologies from the future, not from the past.
Edit: I guess the point is that most of the tech products available at home in the 90's were completely absent in the 60's. There were ancient-looking telephones, TVs and radios but no old ancient-looking walkmans, cell phones, PCs, gameboys, VCRs, modems or web sites.
"A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946."
I don't disagree, it does feel very surreal to reflect on life in the 1990s. But put in context, a lot can happen in 15 years. I mean, imagine living through the era 1930 to 1945. From the days of flappers and the Charleston to Nazism and atomic bombs.
Also, writing PHP is easier than C++ so it's beneficial in that they get a wider pool of developers to use, and they can pay less.
Genius really.
So, now their server farms must be a cover-up, or they're using an old version of MySQL that kept a lot of its clustering data in RAM and are afraid it'll bomb out :-)
I would wager than employing an army of C++ devs would be costlier than employing an army of PHP devs.
I wonder at what point it became clear to Facebook that they were sitting on a targeted advertising goldmine? Surely it was not on the minds of Zuckerberg and Moskovitz (or anyone else!) in the company's early years.
Can Facebook still be considered a “people-meeting service”?
I don't quite really understand this 'oldest trick in the book.'. Can anyone explain what this so called scheme is? Thank you!
Since facebook expanded outside of universities its become more generic, and corporate and lost its "joie de vivre"
You could search for people with a favorite movie, then filter by dorm. You'd write on their wall, invariably the person who listed the movie would own it on DVD, you'd walk over and borrow it.
It was such a tight-knit community you could go "I saw you on facebook, can I have your stuff? Don't worry I'm on facebook too and will give it back"
I must have been one of the last people on campus to sign up
And who ever bought it, isn't Chris Holt!
Yeah wow.
To my astonishment, http://womenwhowanttosleepwithchrisholt.com/ is an unclaimed domain name. At least that's true as of 4:14 p.m. Pacific time.
[1] http://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanf...
Circa 2012-2013
We went the other route.
http://web.archive.org/web/20041010133026cs_/http://www.stan...
> No megabytes of css
Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.
> no bootstrap
Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availabilty at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap.
> No webpack with plethora of dependencies to load, parse and execute.
Why is that even relevant? Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
Sure, but it oftentimes isn't
Bootstrap, a theme for it, app css, a couple of 3rd party vendors, and we are over a megabyte.
> a big win in productivity/quality
Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not
>Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild, while being driven by business decisions rather than technical concerns, which is understable surely, but look how nostalgic people are getting.
Who's doing that? And if they are adding dependencies without consideration of page-speed, they're to blame, and they'll never understand performance.
Bootstrap is not the problem. Hypothetical bad devs would have been making similar mistakes with flash prior to that, or whatever alternative CSS libs were available, and were being cobbled together piecemeal prior to Bootstrap.
> a big win in productivity/quality
>> Only if you are doing an SPA which mimics desktop applications. Which journalism sites are usually not
That is false. Bootstrap's primary use-case is as a CSS framework, not something solely for SPAs. From the early days it solved cross browser issues even for supposedly simple things like 'forms' for which there were no well-established conventions beforehand. Go trawl through the BS1 & 2 issue threads around form elements, and see all the things they fixed.
> Why is that relevant for such a site? Who exactly is advocating for a 'plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
>> Well no one, but sites still do this in the wild [...]
So those tools don't deserve the abuse/noise.
> Who's doing that?
You either don't use the web since 2008 or something or are lying: nearly all websites start with this setup.
It's an industry wide issue that we keep trying to solve using shitty duct-tape and hacks, while not addressing the underlying problem.
This is just a reaction to that (and one that I agree with)
Edit:
> Why would there ever be megabytes of CSS for such a site, apart from for ads, which is the main problem with modern 'content sites'.
Dunno, but people keep doing it for some reason
> Bootstrap can be tiny, and a big win in productivity/quality, so 'no Bootstrap' likely cost the devs in its lack of availability at the time. It looks far worse and is less usable on mobile particularly (but on desktop too) than it would be if built with Bootstrap.
Bootstrap can be, but IME it typically isn't. Additionally, I constantly hear webdevs say it "makes mobile better", but I tend to disagree. I admit that this is purely opinion.
> Who exactly is advocating for 'webpack with plethora of dependencies' for that kind of website?
Pretty much every webdev I talk to. Admittedly not necessarily webpack but usually something similar.
I do understand that good tools being misused aren't bad tools, but, as a user, you can't expect me to be happy when I see those or similar tools when most of your industry is abusing them.
To be fair, there really wasn't any "mobile" to speak of back then, so the developers couldn't even try to make it look good on mobile.
I feel like while they were inspired by some concepts from there, the biggest contributor to the idea (apart from the need of locking in people in one 'easily acessible' platform) was opera's OBML format/protocol which was really decent at the time and provided a lot of benefits AML is marketed for. Probably the only problem with it was the lack of any interactive javascript, and that where it failed to meet adoption. Oh, but well, it was really niche as well, that did nothing good too.
I like this idea, but I wonder how long it would take my brain to think like this.
I feel like new people keep entering the web field and forgetting all the lessons learned from the (very very recent) past.
The inline approach might work for a small site. But in that case, why use a pre-processor at all and why would you need config objects?
CSS doesn't need to be rocket science. If you want atomic CSS then leverage CSS and style the base elements, it's actually pretty good at what it does.
Edit: I may have misinterpreted it's use case, I am all for compenent based styles. I still think there is no need for a pre-processor of inline styles with a completely new lexicon. If you are already in the context of a component you already have the beauty of a scoped and simplified CSS workspace, why make that so much more complicated with a new build pipeline and completely new syntax and lexicon?
The entry barrier for web technologies is just rather low. This is probably the main reason for Node's huge growth in the past years: It's just the path of least resistance to get into back end development.
There _are_ people who are good at both visual design and computer science, but not as many as designers who learned enough to code what they needed to.
Putting styles needed to render your above the fold content inside <head> is a sensible thing to do, assuming you've been able to restrain yourself by not animating the buggery out of everything, and have kept your stylesheet small. It saves a roundtrip to the server or CDN that will block your content from rendering.
Putting all your styles inline? Sheer madness. Inventing your own syntax to do it? Even worse. The whole thing with CSS is, used well, it does actually reduce page weight vs. old skool HTML table and element based styling. You lose all that if you start bunging all your styles inline.
Still, I suppose if your page is already 4 #@<£ing megabytes because of all the crap you've cargo-culted in, maybe it doesn't matter so much. </snark>