It's February 4, 2004. A group of sweaty-palmed Harvard students is about to nervously share its latest project with the world. Seven years later, that little project — an initially exclusive social network — rules our lives.
As hard as it is to believe, not even a full decade has passed since Mark Zuckerberg and his crew of college friends decided to create what is now Facebook — and along with it, a whole slew of issues and topics we never imagined we'd have to deal with:
- Decisions regarding whether to call the cops over fake profile pages
- The need to create elaborate flowcharts in order to understand proper wall post etiquette
- Fear that careless remarks will mark us as cyberbullies
- Guidelines regarding when it's time to stop obsessively chasing after old flames online
- Government-sanctioned holidays celebrating the existence of Web site security features
- Embarrassed moments during which we realize that our parents might be more popular than we are
- Lawsuits over the inability to access a social network — and the ensuing debates over whether that's a human right
- Mobile devices practically created entirely around a website
- Moral debates over whether it's acceptable to pee and poke at the same time
- The desire to buy virtual sheep with virtual currency
The weird list of issues goes on — and even includes huge debates over whether we are somehow less human for using Facebook — yet we still can't seem to get ourselves to stop using the site or asking people to "like" us on it. After all, we can't possibly miss out on using a social network that's got its own hilariously dramatic movie, right?
Happy seventh birthday, Facebook. We wish you all the best — even if you make us shake our heads and mutter "What hath the Zuck wrought?" each and every day.
Rosa Golijan writes about tech here and there. If she wasn't obsessed with Twitter, she'd tell you to go like her on Facebook.
