Facebook nostalgia

Yesterday, my sister gave birth to a son. I helped the family out with proclaiming the news by posting a baby picture on my brother-in-law's Facebook wall. Which got me to thinking about how rapidly Facebook has moved from novelty, to usefulness, to indispensibility.

I got on Facebook before most of my friends. The networking site came to Duke in early 2004, during my last semester of college. Back then only a handful of campuses had Facebook networks, and Facebook was a long way from being a verb. In fact, it wasn't called "Facebook" at all: it was Thefacebook.com. I first found out about it from an article in the school newspaper. Check out that article for a sense of initial reactions to the site. I remember setting up my profile, and thinking, "This is boring. Why did I just do that?" If we had only known.