In February 2004, 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, wearing flip-flops, published an online directory of Harvard students. Back then, the internet still felt small. It was mostly about finding websites, not people.
It turned out that the Internet was very good at connecting people. In the first 24 hours, more than 1,000 Harvard students signed up for TheFacebook.com. The site quickly spread throughout campus by word of mouth. By the end of 2004, dozens of other universities were on Facebook. The site had 1 million monthly users. Myspace's user base was about five times larger, but not for long.
Social media predated Facebook, but nothing had captured the magic of what Zuckerberg and his classmates had hacked together. The 2004 version of Facebook was extremely simple, which worked in its favor. There was the ability to search for someone and see everything they revealed about themselves, which turned out to be a lot in those early days. You could send friend requests and of course nudges – the digital nudge that already existed.
The experience was voyeuristic in a way that, in retrospect, undoubtedly contributed to its success. If you had an account in 2004, Facebook was a place full of people you knew from school – or, in many cases, desperate ones wanted knowledge. Because of Facebook's real name and .edu email policies, people couldn't hide behind anonymity. Little did we know the impact sharing our lives with the world would have. It felt new and exciting.
I didn't create a Facebook account until March 2008, two years after the launch of News Feed, the constantly updated feed of updates from friends that was eventually replicated across the Internet. It's no exaggeration to say that the News Feed concept, which Facebook initially released to users' revolt, has changed the way people interact with each other. Connecting was no longer a one-to-one exchange. Well, it was a stream.
I remember being the first in my class to have a profile, but not for long; I quickly convinced several of my friends to sign up. After all, Facebook would be nothing without the people you knew there. It became the way we stayed in touch with each other throughout the day, how we expressed who we wanted to be to the people around us, and perhaps most importantly, how we flirted with each other. Sending a friend request was like sliding into someone's direct messages back before direct messages existed.
Within a few years, it felt like everyone was on Facebook: parents, teachers, siblings, and brands. Facebook recognized early on that selling ads in exchange for engagement would be the best business model for a free service. Zuckerberg's mission was to connect the world, and Facebook was able to fund that goal by building one of the most lucrative advertising engines in human history.
As money became more of a factor, Facebook's unique insight – that we want to communicate with the people we know online – began to backfire. As we grew older, but Facebook kept a record of our posts, we realized that a digital record of our private lives could be used against us in countless ways. It used to feel liberating to be authentically yourself on Facebook. it eventually became a burden.
These days, the main way I experience Facebook is through the Reminders feature, which I sometimes still check after deleting the endless stream of notifications that mostly don't interest me. I usually delete everything along the way on my profile, except anything that's particularly nostalgic. The further back, the more banal the posts become. Fourteen years ago, you checked into Whole Foods through Gowalla. From 2005: I listen to Weezer. Stuff like that.
As silly as it feels to post things like this on the internet now, it's nice to be reminded of a time when we shared more of ourselves with the people we actually knew. So much social media has focused more on the topic media than actually connecting with friends. Short videos recommended by algorithms are more engaging and easier to monetize than posts intended for your close friends.
This kind of connection still happens online, but not on Facebook – or anywhere in public. Although he was a little late in recognizing the trend, Zuckerberg himself admitted in 2019 that face-to-face conversations were shifting from the news feed and its algorithm to chat threads. Conveniently, he had already paid $16 billion to acquire WhatsApp a few years earlier.
That means Facebook's future is increasingly independent of the things that made it successful 20 years ago. Meta executives say their purpose is now “social discovery,” a concept that is less about finding close friends and more about finding new videos to watch. Zuckerberg recently said he expects AI-generated content to fill social media feeds and displace humans even further. Soon it might seem like no one you know is on Facebook anymore. It might feel like there are no people left at all.