The Face of Facebook

Part of Handsome Slapdashery, a column by Jon Dutko.

What high school socialite is without Facebook nowadays? Facebook has become such an omnipresent facet of life in high school, simultaneously a vehicle for social interaction and a platform for a vast array of third-party application. Tragically, not owning a well-groomed Facebook profile has come to be seen as a slight social taint. Of course, I could write pages arguing why Facebook is the plague destroying our generation’s willpower and ability to communicate meaningfully. Similarly, it would not be difficult to find evidence that Facebook has single-handedly changed the face of both the internet and social interaction for the better.

This isn’t either of those articles. This article chronicles the numerous changes, some subtle, some monumental, to the Facebook layout and infrastructure.

First, a bit of history. Facebook is actually the descendant of Facemash, a similar website written my now-gajillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, whose original goal was to create a “Hot or Not” spinoff for his Harvard dormitory. However, Zuckerberg, “a little intoxicated” at the time, had willingly breached campus security in retrieving electronic copies of dormitory identification, and faced expulsion. The charges were eventually dropped, but so was the Facemash project.

The next semester, Zuckerberg teamed up with several of his Harvard friends to create TheFacebook.com, a Harvard-only social network. Within the first twenty-four hours of the site’s existence, at least 1200 members had registered; within weeks, over half of Harvard’s undergraduate population had joined. Soon, Zuckerberg and his team decided to extend the website’s userbase to students at Yale, Stanford and Columbia. Quickly, Facebook, the clunky “the” dropped from its name, had extended to the vast majority of North American universities. In 2005, Facebook took the logical next step by expanding its userbase to high school students, becoming the most basic version of the Facebook platform we use today.

The features we are most familiar with were also slow to come. The ability to add not-textual attachments to the Wall was added only in 2007; the News Feed was factored into the equation in 2006, with Notes following later in the same year; and Chat, which is now widely and readily used, only came to Facebook in 2008.

Perhaps the most overwhelming change to come to Facebook, however, was its radical shift from a single-party social networking website to a platform for third-party applications. The functionality of Facebook expanded almost infinitely overnight. No longer was Facebook merely a virtual network; it became a gaming console, a news outlet, a media hub, and countless more newly founded roles.

For years I’ve heard my fellow Facebook users bemoan the site’s loss of aesthetic appeal, or ease of use, or functionality. In my three and a half years of using the site, I count at least four major paradigm shifts in the look or feel of Facebook, all of which were met with a certain degree of resistance. This resistance has always completely evaporated some weeks afterward.

A couple of weeks ago, there was another relatively major shift to the user interface of Facebook. Predictably, it was met with resistance. I’d like to remind anyone who still feels resentment towards this change, or those who plan on loudly decrying future ones, to remember Facebook’s long evolutionary history. The change has always been — and for the foreseeable future, will be — for the better.