What Facebook, Google+ and YouTube would have looked like in 1997 | Hacker News Reader

What Facebook, Google+ and YouTube would have looked like in 1997

thenextweb.com

74 pointsmdhayes19 comments

Ah the olden days.

What's the point of this. Just see what they actually looked like http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...

It's not like the 'fake' ones are particularly funny or anything.

The point is to see how technology has progressed in 14 years. Your link is irrelevant as none of the sites in question were live in 1997.

Look at the screenshot of Amazon from 1995.

That screenshot is NOT from 1995. It has a reference to zShops, which didn't launch until 1999.

You know, there were actually good designers in the late 90s and HTML and CSS were reasonably mature.

Yeah, these styles seem to be targeting '94, not 97. I have fond memories of imdb around that time in the mosaic browser I think.

I'm pretty sure tables had border=0 even in 94.

Sites like these always trigger an upswell of nostalgia for me. Looking at these old screenshots I can remember how hip I felt after installing Netscape Communicator and browsing various sites. Perl was the new frontier.

The Internet still seemed like something you could wrap your head around in its entirety, if you tried.

Link to a link - Direct source: http://1x-upon.com/

I love the would-be prankster on the Facebook page, trying to sneak an alert("Delete C:/?") onto the page.

What is this nonsense about google? The domain was registered in 97 and launche in 98 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google

[edit: my mistake, google+]

It says Google+ not Google.

That said, the 1998 version of Google looked much, much better than their mocked up 1997 version of Google+.

Yeah you're right. I'd be interested in seeing some designers at these companies build something using only the layout and styling tools supported by most browsers of the day.

Me too, but to be fair, cellspacing="0" was well understood by serious web designers at the time in contrast with these examples.

I like 1997 YouTube better.

The choice of codecs and container formats gave me a giggle. It's easy to criticize Flash, but web video was an out and out pain prior to Flash video players.

It should say "RealVideo", too, actually, as that was the format of the day.

Since others are handling the arguments over technical and stylistic aspects, I will comment on another problem with the Facebook dedesign:

Pokemon was not yet popular in 1997. The anime scene was all about Ranma, Slayers, Evangelion, Techni Muyo, and whatever movie had aired on the Sci-Fi channel the past Saturday. Sailor Moon was running on TV and was very popular but we tried to forget about that. Of course, the user could be from Japan where Pokemon had been running for half a year, or they could have gotten a sub off Usenet, but Pokemon did not get popular in the English-speaking world until the dub was aired later in the decade.

The real name policy was a defining feature of Facebook. A site that doesn't have that can hardly be called the same thing.

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