The really interesting question (which no doubt some people will think is easily answered as "no one") is, who invented this even earlier than Lincoln? To reuse Thomas Mann's metaphor, history is like a set of coulisses, walls sliding away to reveal something else behind. Every time you think you've found the bottom of the well, something slides out and reveals another bottomless chasm further on. So it is with ideas…
I'm sure some of the earliest writings were not unlike today's Facebook walls...
If this is real, which various other people have raised question to. Could it count as prior art in a reexamination [1] of some of the Yahoo patents that Yahoo is using to sue Facebook? [2] Specifically the "social network patent", which is apparently a patent for "World modeling using a relationship network with communication channels to entities"[3].
Can't find a single mention of the Springfield Gazette in relation to Lincoln via Google, or at the Lincoln Museum site. Also can't find any evidence in searching, that the Springfield Gazette has ever existed. Certainly is suspicious.
It's a neat story, but I am suspicious too. The photo in the Springfield Gazette is a mirror image of this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abelincoln1846.jpeg . Wikipedia claims this photo is from 1846, but the newspaper is from 1845. Also, I would be surprised if a photo could be printed with that level of detail in 1845. I wonder if this more of a tribute to P.T. Barnum (the first subject mentioned in the ar…
Remember they didn't have raster images in 1845. That would have been a physical stamp of some kind that was inked and pressed along with the type (or maybe afterward, since this seems to be a one-off). The historian in the story claims Lincoln used this picture a lot, so it's likely that he commissioned a physical block made for this purpose, quite high-quality and reusable in multiple publications.
Seriously, why do titles like this make it to the top of HN?
Yeah, Lincoln totally outpwned Zuck, because the idea of a place to give updates about your life is so mind-boggling, and that idea itself is why Zuck is rich.