So Facebook turned 10 yesterday. Ten years since Zuckerberg was allegedly ranking people's photos in a Harvard dorm room, and now the thing is basically load-bearing infrastructure for how I keep track of what my cousins are up to. To mark it they rolled out this thing called "Look Back," a little autoplay video that mines your own timeline and stitches together your "most meaningful" photos and status updates into a minute-long highlight reel with a swoopy piano soundtrack.
I watched mine at my desk yesterday afternoon instead of doing actual work, which I assume was the point.
It opens with your first profile picture. Mine from whenever-I-joined is some grainy webcam shot that looks like it was taken through a sock. Then it just marches forward through the years, pulling posts based on likes and comments, so what you get isn't really "your best moments," it's "the stuff your friends happened to click a thumbs up on." Which is a subtly different and kind of depressing metric once you think about it for more than five seconds. My video had exactly one photo from my actual wedding-adjacent-important-life-stuff and about four photos of a burrito.
I dont say that to be cute, its genuinely what happened. The algorithm does not know the difference between a milestone and a Tuesday.
There's something a little uncanny about a company deciding, on its own, what your last decade meant. Nobody asked Facebook to summarize me. I didnt request a highlight reel. It just showed up in my feed with a little gift-box icon next to it, already rendered, already scored to music, waiting for me to hit play like it was a birthday present instead of a targeted feature rollout timed to a PR moment. And I watched it anyway, and I sort of liked it, which annoys me more than if I'd hated it outright.
I'm turning into exactly the kind of person who complains about a free video and then watches it twice.
Anyway. Ten years is a real number for a company that started as a way to rate hot-or-not for Ivy League undergrads. I signed up in college mostly because my roommate wouldnt shut up about it, and now it's the thing my mother uses to keep tabs on me between actual phone calls. Somewhere in between those two facts is the whole story of the last decade of the internet, if you want to get grand about it, which I dont really want to today.
The other thing eating everyone's week
Small aside because I cant write a post right now without mentioning it: if you have an iPhone and havent downloaded Flappy Bird yet, brace yourself, because it is currently sitting at the top of the free app charts and it has ruined at least three dinners at my house this week. It's free, it's from some Vietnamese developer nobody had heard of a month ago, and the entire game is tapping the screen to keep a pixelated bird from smacking into green pipes. That's it. There is no other mechanic. I have gotten a personal best of 14 and I am unreasonably proud of this, which tells you everything about where my standards currently are. My roommate is convinced its rigged to be harder than it looks and honestly I cant argue with him, the hitboxes feel personal.
Its the kind of dumb, cheap, instantly-shareable thing that spreads because everyone wants to beat their friend's score, not because its good in any deep sense. I dont think it'll last. Things this simple burn hot and then everyone moves on to the next simple thing. But right now, today, its basically all anyone in my group chat is talking about, Facebook's fancy nostalgia video included.
Ten years of Facebook, a garbage little bird game nobody can put down, and me writing about both at 11pm on a Tuesday instead of going to bed. Some things about this blog never change either, I guess.