In 2004, a site called Thefacebook appeared on what we used to call the World Wide Web. Initially it resembled an interactive, year-round yearbook for kids at elite universities. But then came new features. Long before users were angered by privacy breaches, they were delighted and sometimes confused by the variety of additions aimed at making the social network "better."
Come walk with us down memory lane as we reminisce about Facebook features ultimately left to fade or die due to unpopularity.
If you're an early Facebook user (I joined in mid-2005), let us know which ones you wish the company would bring back, or any other long-lost Facebook features we might have missed.
1. The Facebook Guy
Before the 2007 redesign, a man's face obscured with binary code appeared at the top-left of Facebook's header. It turns out the image was manipulated from a 1987 photo of Peter Wolf, lead vocalist for the J. Geils Band.
2. Virtual Gifts
Did your friends ever give you a picture of a beer for your birthday? An orange soda? In this early Facebook phenomenon, one could buy virtual gifts to post on a friend's Wall via Facebook Credits. Originally launched in 2007, it was the first time you could spend actual money on Facebook.
Despite generating cash, Facebook shut down the service on Aug. 1, 2010 — in favor of a gift program that allows users to send real, tangible gifts, instead.
3. The Facebook Wall
Before Timeline, your Facebook profile featured a Wall. Your status update logged in a different part of your profile; therefore, the Wall was a space where friends could write notes specially for you. In fact, last year Facebook faced a related user outcry — many people assumed Facebook had made old private messages public — before the News Feed, a user's Wall was only accessible by going to a person's profile, making it feel like a safe place for more intimate posts.
Interestingly, the Wall was originally intended as a sort of white board. Friends could change or delete what was already there, but users generally favored posting new content at the top, so Facebook tweaked the system to display individual comments in reverse chronological order.
At one point, it was cool to "de-virgin" someone's Wall, i.e., be the first to post.
A user's activity, displayed on the "Mini-Feed," was added to the Wall in 2006, and ultimately it was replaced by Timeline in 2011.
4. Facebook Groups
The original Facebook Groups were more or less lost once Facebook expanded outside of schools. In the beginning, groups were network-only, so if students at Harvard and UC Berkeley wanted to be in the same group, they essentially had to create different chapters.
One such group that spread school-to-school was called "I went to public school ... bitch." In my SoCal college, I was proudly a member of "I wear my Rainbow sandals every day."
The point in joining groups, really, was to have the group names displayed in a section on your profile — much like your Books, Movies or Quotes sections, the Groups served to define your identity (plus, the type of people you associated with).
4. Original Status Updates
Before Facebook, we used AIM and the away message. When Facebook first introduced the status update, it was reminiscent, with one notable exception: The field to input your status was preceded by "[Your Name] is ...", inducing grammatical gymnastics for many people.
Facebook hasn't entirely strayed from prompts, though — in the status field, it currently asks, "What's Happening, Danielle?" and also, "What's on your mind?"
5. Notes
Could Facebook be a blogging platform? History tells us, no. The Notes feature, while still live, is hidden in navigation. You can view your notes by adding "/notes" after your profile URL, or by clicking the down arrow to expand the tiles on your profile page.
If you were on Facebook in 2009, you might have logged a Note entitled "25 Things," a style of chain letter widespread enough to warrant New York Times coverage. The prompt, included in each person's note, went like this:
Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged . You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.
The demise of Notes can also be attributed to today's Facebook statuses, which can log up to 63,206 characters.
6. Wall-to-Wall
Before threaded comments, where Facebook conversations take place today, you could elect to "See Friendship." Before that, "See Wall-to-Wall." Remember back even further: You actually had to click back and forth between two profiles to see what two other people were talking about. Some even used the phrase as a verb (e.g. "Did you wall-to-wall Michelle and Becky? Looks like they're fighting.").
Yes, this sounds like stalking. That's what Facebook was for in those days.
Like many other updates, introducing a way to see two people's Wall posts in order of timestamp was creepy, precisely because it brought to light that people were using the service to "stalk." Apparently, the ability to see the friendship between two people — literally, every interaction between them on Facebook — was initially despised, as well.
7. The Honesty Box
Want to really know what you're friends think of you? The Honesty Box allowed you to ask questions that your friends could answer anonymously, or send anonymous messages to those you hated, or had a crush on (it would only show whether you were male or female). It was one of the early apps on Facebook, launched in 2007. It has since been shut down.
8. Poke
Before Facebook launched an app called Poke to compete with Snapchat, the Poke was an arbitrary action on the nascent social network. The site's FAQ did little to clear up what a Poke was, but perhaps users knew exactly what it meant, or just used it to mean a variety of things.
While no longer going strong, the ability to Poke other Facebook users still exists. Just visit a friend's profile and click the down arrow on Settings, just below the right side of the cover photo.
Facebook discontinued another early Facebook app called SuperPoke, which most memorably allowed you to throw a sheep at a friend. The app was acquired by Slide, which was later acquired by Google, which shut SuperPoke down for good.
Image courtesy of Crunchbase
9. Snowball Fight and Food Fight
Before your friends posted about farm animals, they threw virtual food and perhaps snowballs.
10. "Too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns"
In the early days, you might have seen phrases in the footers of certain pages, which on closer look, contained movie quotes. "Too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns" is from Top Gun, as is “That’s a negative, Ghostrider. The pattern is full." Another: “I don’t even know what a quail looks like,” from Wedding Crashers.
11. Pirate Language
Talk Like a Pirate Day is Sept. 19, and in 2008, Facebook debuted "English (Pirate)" as one of its languages. Once activated, your entire profile is translated to pirate langage. Examples include "1 sorry lout thinks they're yer mate!" instead of "1 person added you as friend," and "What be troublin' ye" instead of "What's on your mind?"
Image courtesy of Soc Media News
Pirate is still offered as a language, along with English (Upside Down) — yes, what you think — and Leet.
12. Profiles With Hyperlinked Text
Sometimes, it's difficult to remember a Facebook before the "Like." But it existed, and it was glorious. Your profile picture sat nearby 10 additional fields, including contact information, Looking For (Friendship, Dating, Networking, Random Play, Whatever I Can Get), Relationship Status, Interests, Favorite Music, Favorite TV Shows, Favorite Movies, Favorite Books, Quotes and, finally, About Me. Your Groups were also listed, as well as other schools you had friends at, with the number of your friends in parentheses next to the school name.
Some examples:
Click on something hyperlinked, which was nearly everything, and you could see a list of everyone in your network who had that interest or connection listed on his or her profile. If I wanted to find a guy who liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I could just add it to my own profile, click on it, and voila.
Most people would edit and update the content in their favorite lists ruthlessly. After all, there was no News Feed to announce changes, if you decided Christian Aguilera wasn't really representative of you, after all. This epoch of Facebook history is probably the time when user data most closely matched a person's true interests.
The text profiles were killed in 2010 when Facebook began prompting users to turn their interests and favorites into Community Pages. The problem with this was, as much as I liked running and felt that interest was profile-worthy, I didn't want to follow a Page generically geared toward "Running." Thus began the devaluation of the "Like," something the network is still trying to reclaim via Graph Search.
These Community Pages and later Brand Pages were built on trusted friend referrals, rather than supplying Facebook's interest graph with data. But it seems replacing one with the other reduced the ability of users to provide Facebook's ad algorithm monster with accurate personal data.
13. Courses
When Facebook profiles were organized by network — the network being the school you were at — you could select which classes you planned to take each semester, based on your school's course listings. It was a great way to stalk potential classmates before the first day, or even choose courses by classmates and buy and sell text books for a better deal than the campus bookstore.
Courses didn't make it through 2007, when Facebook (you'll recognize the author of theblog post, Dave Morin, now founder of Path) suggested third-party apps could fill the gap. It's most likely that non-students infiltrating the network made this school-only feature less relevant.
14. Bumper Stickers
Bumper Stickers is a third-party application that was simultaneously despised and loved, it seems. The images, which could be found in the app or uploaded, seemed to clutter an otherwise clean Wall with colorful and often cheesy pictures. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say those old Bumper Sticker fanatics have now infiltrated Pinterest. Take a look at the video below for examples.
If you get a hankering to send a bumper sticker to a friend (or post to your own profile,as I did), the app is still live.
15. Konami Code
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A. If you did these actions on your keyboard on a Facebook page, it would activate what was called a lens flare.
A cheat code in video games, the Konami Easter Egg was really popular at the time. Similar tricks were hidden on other sites, including Digg and Google Reader.
Unfortunately, the code no longer works on Facebook.
16. The News Feed
The News Feed still lives on today, but deserves a mention here; it is largely responsible for morphing the way people used Facebook.
In a headline so overplayed it would be regarded as a joke now, MSNBC announced(via an AP story), "Facebook Feature Draws Privacy Concerns," on Sept. 8, 2006. The addition of the News Feed led to Mark Zuckerberg's first major apology to users.
The News Feed marks the end of people obsessively editing their favorite movies and books. Since then, Facebook has become less of a rabbit hole, in which one click leads to another in an endless journey through people's lives — now, the Facebook experience is often like opening your refrigerator door, staring in, not sure what you're looking for.
17. Fan Pages
On November 7, 2007, Facebook announced Fan Pages (along with Beacon and social ads) to replace "sponsored groups," which at the time, were the only acceptable way for a brand or business to represent itself on Facebook. The goal, as told toMarketingWeek, was that the feature "enables businesses to create their own pages, which users can then recommend to friends, and uses behavioural targeting techniques to serve ads."
Pages initially had "Fans," so in order to follow the Page, you would merely click "Become a Fan."
In April 2010, Facebook introduced the Like in order to spread its grip across the web. (It didn't make sense to put "Share" on lots of sites, but "Like" could really port anywhere.) In June of the same year, the Like button replaced "Become a Fan" as a way to ease the perceived commitment.
In my own personal use, I found that I was indeed too click-happy with the Like button, and the relevance of my News Feed continues to suffer.
18. Beacon
Remember the year that Facebook stole Christmas?
Facebook Beacon was a partnership between Facebook and certain sites, including Blockbuster, eBay, The Knot and others. Actions on those sites would be broadcast to News Feeds in the form of a user's Facebook activity. The first problem was that users couldn't opt out of the whole thing; they had to opt out case-by-case. Soon, surprise Christmas presents and engagement ring purchases spilled over the social network.
Facebook was sued over privacy concerns for its data collection practices on sites other than its own. In 2009, Beacon was shut down.
18. Facebook Questions
When smaller upstarts offer something cool, Facebook sometimes adds the feature to its own platform, as if growing a new tentacle. See: Foursquare and Facebook Places, Snapchat and Facebook Poke, Instagram and Facebook Camera (purchasing the competitor just happened this one time) and finally, Quora and Facebook Questions.
Sure enough, Quora launched in January 2010, and Facebook Questions followed inJuly (although you never know for sure how long these things were in production or on the drawing table).
As it failed to gain traction, Facebook Questions was slowly removed from the site, and fully pulled in late 2012.
Thumbnail composite courtesy of Flickr, yourdon