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I remember the early days, when you could only join with a university account, and the only people you could interact with were others in the same network. Pri

I remember the early days, when you could only join with a university account, and the only people you could interact with were others in the same network. Privacy controls were 'public' by default, but then the only people seeing stuff were fellow students anyway. It was fantastic. I deleted my Facebook account a few years ago for various reasons, but they had a really great product back then. Somehow I doubt this will capture the charm of v1.

gxqoz 6y ago
The killer feature for me in Facebook's early days is that people could list the classes they had. This made it easy to message your classmates to get help on an assignment.
- asveikau 6y ago
  I remember when they killed that feature. It was the same time they introduced an app platform. To replace the feature, there were competing class list apps, each requiring users install it and with its own data, so none of them worked. I remember thinking whoever made that decision probably didn't understand the feature. But they sure were motivated to build an app ecosystem nobody asked for.
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  The coolest feature for me back then was seeing how you were related to another profile through the friend graph. It felt like you could click on any person in your school and find a path of friends that connected you.
citizenkeen 6y ago
I was studying abroad when Facebook started expanding beyond Harvard. I was in a dorm filled with liberal arts students from across the US. I remember when about a third of us got "approved" for Facebook, and two thirds were just jealously wondering why their elite private liberal art schools weren't "good enough". I've never seen a clearer case of envy/FOMO.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I artificial dislike artificial scarcity created by startups because they don't have something useful I would pay right away for. Share our site and you will get moved up in the queue and I will say no. It's okay to limit initial users but this is manipulative behaviour. I wonder if I should make an extension or site to list them all.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I’d be curious to see such a list, just out of my own morbid curiosity.
  - Nbox9 6y ago
    > artificial scarcity Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was most likely buying their own hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their servers at capacity and dealing with both hardware and software scaling issues. Edit: FB is also an image heavy website, which at the time was considered a heavy website.

gxqoz 6y ago

The killer feature for me in Facebook's early days is that people could list the classes they had. This made it easy to message your classmates to get help on an assignment.

asveikau 6y ago
I remember when they killed that feature. It was the same time they introduced an app platform. To replace the feature, there were competing class list apps, each requiring users install it and with its own data, so none of them worked. I remember thinking whoever made that decision probably didn't understand the feature. But they sure were motivated to build an app ecosystem nobody asked for.
RandallBrown 6y ago
The coolest feature for me back then was seeing how you were related to another profile through the friend graph. It felt like you could click on any person in your school and find a path of friends that connected you.

citizenkeen 6y ago

I was studying abroad when Facebook started expanding beyond Harvard. I was in a dorm filled with liberal arts students from across the US. I remember when about a third of us got "approved" for Facebook, and two thirds were just jealously wondering why their elite private liberal art schools weren't "good enough". I've never seen a clearer case of envy/FOMO.

searchableguy 6y ago
I artificial dislike artificial scarcity created by startups because they don't have something useful I would pay right away for. Share our site and you will get moved up in the queue and I will say no. It's okay to limit initial users but this is manipulative behaviour. I wonder if I should make an extension or site to list them all.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I’d be curious to see such a list, just out of my own morbid curiosity.
- Nbox9 6y ago
  > artificial scarcity Remember, Facebook was running on a PHP backend. Apache spins up an entire _process_ for every HTTP request it receives. Facebook was most likely buying their own hardware. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were running their servers at capacity and dealing with both hardware and software scaling issues. Edit: FB is also an image heavy website, which at the time was considered a heavy website.