Also available here [1], with a PDF version of the printed issue. It's interesting that the archive is separate from the Stanford Daily website.
[1] http://stanforddailyarchive.com/cgi-bin/stanford?a=d&d=stanf...
TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#122Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#123I remember being able to look up who was in your class. Facebook was so much more enjoyable when it was just university students, it was more fun, playful, and I guess innocent. Since facebook expanded outside of universities its become more generic, and corporate and lost its "joie de vivre"
Here's a trick that used to work in 2005:
You could search for people with a favorite movie, then filter by dorm. You'd write on their wall, invariably the person who listed the movie would own it on DVD, you'd walk over and borrow it.
It was such a tight-knit community you could go "I saw you on facebook, can I have your stuff? Don't worry I'm on facebook too and will give it back"
Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> less usable on mobile To be fair, there really wasn't any "mobile" to speak of back then, so the developers couldn't even try to make it look good on mobile.
There was WAP, which was kind of the ancestor of AMP. It wasn't terribly popular then either.
I'll rather browse WAP pages again compared to modern "mobile optimized" sites. Huge fonts, huge pictures (sadly this trend came back to desktop, what's information density again), sticky toolbars with retarded social icons, ads that make a multicore mobile device with several GB of RAM to hiccup, etc. Desktop view was fine.
Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, I thought part of Facebook's instant success was because, with the exception of wilfully-obtuse student columnists, most students instantly "got" it because they'd had some sort of internet profile and compulsively-updated statuses since their parents had finally succumbed to the avalanche of AOL CDs in 1997. Even the university, moving at such glacial pace it still ran a nineties Windows NT, was trying to g…
The original Facebook didn't have a status to update; that didn't come until around late 2007 or early 2008. There was no chat until that time as well, just "poke." In 2004 it still managed to be "social" for its time though, especially with its focus on a campus. For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload.…
I've had people ask me why I always refer to it as "the facebook" and its fun explaining to people that that really was what it was called at the time I signed up. Also, "the facebook" was late to my college campus (relatively) so we hopped through a small collection of facebooks. It's weird today that most people don't realize there were multiple competitive facebooks or that it was essentially a generic term before it was a brand...
It's especially weird when I see people roll their eyes or laugh at someone say my grandmother's age referring to it as "the facebook", because to them its quaint and elderly, and I'm tempted to break out the "get off my lawn, that's what it has always been called" speech... Internet history is weird.
Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#126Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The really weird thing is how actual technology in movies from the 80's and 90's looks so much worse to people in 2017 than technology in moves from the 50's and 60's looked to people in the late 90's. On the other hand though, I still feel like the analog computers they used back in the day are technologies from the future, not from the past.
I think I've been cured of this bias by seeing a lot of videos of analog modular synthesizers, which share the patch-cable programming techniques of analog computers. Analog systems can do some interesting things, and they have a nice physicality to them. The noise, instability, feedback, and imperfections in analog synthesis have an aesthetic appeal that has only matured with time. In ease of programming, though, si…
For more on analog synthesizers and systems, the documentary "I Dream of Wires" is highly recommended, and available on Netflix streaming.
Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#128Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now that you put it that way, man... things have changed. I can't help thinking about further back, too. Just imagine how it felt to live around the turn of last century! Planes, [newer] trains, and automobiles! Electricity, plumbing, underground subway transportation. Hygienic medicine. Vaccines. Telegraphs reaching out overseas and powering thousands of morning daily papers; becoming a commodity instead of luxury.…
I was in a flight yesterday and thought about that. Our generation is crazy, but then I've always taken flying for granted, I've flew airplanes all my life. I can't imagine how it must have been for people before me to discover these huge things that could transport you km away.
I wonder if community was more central to life back then. With the world being so large I'd speculate/imagine that "place" and the people in that place were more unique. Maybe more intimate at times.
Re: TheFacebook.com’s darker side (2004)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't disagree, I'm just saying that there is a certain design ugliness that seems to be unique to turn of the century technology.
> I'm just saying that there is a certain design ugliness that seems to be unique to turn of the century technology. And I'm saying that this is highly subjective and/or controversial. There are tons of beautiful 80s and 90s electronics devices.
Totally agree, it is hugely subjective.