So today Facebook turns eleven. Eleven! It started in a Harvard dorm room back on February 4th, 2004, when it was still called "thefacebook" and you needed an actual .edu email address to even get in the door. I remember hearing about it secondhand from a friend at a state school who couldn't sign up yet because it hadn't rolled out past the Ivies. Feels like a different planet now.
I don't say this to be one of those "remember when the internet was good" guys, because honestly a lot of the early internet was garbage too, just garbage in a different font. But there's something genuinely strange about a website turning into something with a history. Facebook reported something like 1.39 billion monthly active users in their last earnings call, and somewhere in that pile of a billion-plus people is a version of me from 2007 tagging blurry photos from a going away party I don't remember attending. That data is just sitting there. Forever, probably.
This blog is a lot younger than Facebook, obviously, three years and change at this point (November 2011, if you're new here, or if you've somehow forgotten), and even in that shorter span I've gone back and read old posts and cringed so hard I had to close the laptop. I assume Zuckerberg does not do this with his old dorm-room code, but who knows, maybe he does. The Social Network made the founding story into a legend already, gave it a script and a soundtrack and everything, which is a weird thing to have happen to you when you're barely past drinking age.
A quick aside about the weekend
Unrelated tangent, but I have to mention it: the Super Bowl was Sunday, and I'm still thinking about that Seahawks play call at the goal line. You're up 24-28 with the ball at the one yard line, you've got Marshawn Lynch in the backfield, and you throw a slant into triple coverage and Malcolm Butler picks it off to end the game. I watch a lot of football and I don't think I've ever yelled at a television that loud in my life. My upstairs neighbor probably thought something was on fire.
And then there's Left Shark, who has already, in like three days, become more famous than most actual musicians. One of the backup dancers in Katy Perry's halftime show just kind of freelanced the choreography, and now it's everywhere. It's a good reminder that no amount of production budget beats one person accidentally being funny on camera. The ads this year cost something like four and a half million dollars for thirty seconds and I couldn't tell you a single thing about most of them, but a guy in a shark costume missing his cues is going to outlive all of it.
Anyway. Back to Facebook, sort of. What gets me is how much of the internet's institutional memory now lives inside companies instead of on the open web. Eleven years in, Facebook isn't a website anymore so much as a layer of infrastructure that a huge chunk of the planet routes their social life through, and that's a strange kind of power for something that started as a way to rate people's photos in a dorm. I don't think that's some grand indictment, I use the thing every day like everyone else, but it's worth sitting with for a second on the actual anniversary instead of just scrolling past it.
I keep waiting for the day some other network eats Facebook's lunch the way Facebook ate Myspace's, and it hasn't happened yet, not even close, despite people predicting it every single year since around 2009. Maybe it never does. Maybe it just keeps aging in place, getting weirder and more crowded with relatives, the way it already has for a lot of us. Eleven candles. Blow them out somewhere private, I guess, since knowing Facebook it'll remember the exact time you did it anyway.