So Facebook turned 11 last Wednesday, February 4th, and I almost let it slide by without saying anything because "website has a birthday" is not exactly a news story. But then I made the mistake of actually looking at my own account creation date (2009, for the record, I was late to this) and I fell down a Timeline hole for about ninety minutes on a Sunday afternoon I will never get back, and now I have opinions.
Eleven years. Founded in a dorm room in 2004, and now it's this sprawling thing with something like 1.39 billion monthly users last they reported earnings (that was the end of January), which is a number so big it stops meaning anything. More people use Facebook every month than live in any country except China and India. Sit with that for a second. Its not a website anymore, its closer to infrastructure, like electricity or the water main under your street, except the water main doesn't run A/B tests on your emotions.
Anyway, the Timeline hole. If you haven't done this in a while, go look at your own profile from like 2010 or 2011 and just cringe for a solid hour. Mine is a graveyard of Farmville notifications I apparently used to tolerate, a truly upsetting number of "poke" exchanges, and status updates that read like they were written by someone trying very hard to be quoted. I found one from 2010 that just says "coffee. again." with no punctuation and honestly I don't know what that guy was going through but I hope he's ok now.
What's changed isn't just the design, though god knows it's changed, we've gone through at least four total visual overhauls that I can count. It's that the whole posture of the thing is different. Early Facebook felt like a place you went. You logged in, you did your rounds, you logged out. Now it's just sort of always there, in your pocket, pinging you, and since they split Messenger out into its own app last year (a move that made a lot of people furious, myself included, mostly because now I need two apps open instead of one) it's basically become two separate demands on your attention instead of one.
The thing that actually bugs me, and I'll admit this is a small complaint in the scheme of things, is the News Feed algorithm. I don't want it curated. I know the argument, they say if it were pure chronological you'd miss stuff and be overwhelmed, but I'm a grown adult, I can handle scrolling past a post I don't care about. What I can't handle is missing something my actual friend posted three days ago because the algorithm decided a page I liked once in 2012 was more relevant. There's no toggle for this that actually sticks. You can set it to "Most Recent" and it quietly reverts on you within a day or two. I don't think that's an accident.
I'll say one nice thing though, because I don't want this to just be me yelling at a website. Whatever else is true, Facebook is still the only place where my actual extended family, aunts, my grandmother, people who will never touch Twitter, are reachable in one spot. That's not nothing. My grandmother is 78 and she comments on my posts with things like "very nice dear" and I would not trade that for a more elegant algorithm.
Eleven is a weird age for a company to be at. Not a scrappy startup anymore, obviously, but not old enough yet to feel like a fixture the way, I don't know, email feels like a fixture. It's in that middle stretch where it's powerful enough that decisions it makes ripple out to a huge chunk of the internet's population, but it's still moving and changing fast enough that you can't quite predict what it looks like in another five years. I genuinely don't know if we'll still be calling it Facebook. I don't know if Messenger swallows it or if something else does.
Also if anyone finds my 2010 "coffee. again." guy and figures out what was going on with him, let me know. I worry about him sometimes.