Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FreakyT | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad that there's no way to archive of the "inside" of the site. What was it like to actually use Facebook at this time? I actually did use Facebook back then, and even I'm not even sure exactly how I used it before the news feed feature was added -- I'm pretty sure people would click "friends" and then look for a little "profile updated recently" message.

It would be cool if people could go back and try old versions of things in the cloud. With non-cloud software (like Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 1.0), it's possible to do this, but with websites, once they've been taken down, no one will ever be able to use their old versions again. I wonder if there's some way that Facebook could "donate" old versions of their code for posterity.

I don't remember 2006 specifically, but I was on facebook in 2004. Back then, it was only open to .edu addresses. They had a list of all of the dorms at the school and the rooms in them. You would select using a pull down menu which was your room. They also had drop-down menus for all of the classes that the school offered, and there was a 'group' that was created for each class that you could use to construct study groups (or whatever). There was no news feed. Instead of the 'wall' as it is now, it was instead an editable text box that acted like the white board that is common outside dorm rooms.

Ah, I remember the "white board" wall. Back when the Facebook API came out in 2007-ish, I implemented a functioning lookalike using the API -- at one point, it had around 17,000 users who had logged in, including Mark Zuckerberg himself(!!)

...then Facebook basically killed the API (changing it over to a more of an authentication system than an add-content-to-your-profile system) so that was it for my app.

I've always wanted something like this. Not that I have a business model in mind to make it feasible but it would be awesome if it were a separate product that did this for "gardened" content in general.

I've thought about versioning with Web apps. It's not at all an efficient way to spend your time as a company, but there are apps I use where older versions were much more to my suiting.

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