It's too bad that there's no way to archive of the "inside" of the site. What was it like to actually <i>use</i> Facebook at this time? I actually did use Facebook back then, and even I'm not even sure exactly how I used it before the news feed feature was added -- I'm pretty sure people would click "friends" and then look for a little "profile updated recently" message.<p>It would be cool if people could go back and try old versions of things in the cloud. With non-cloud software (like Windows 3.1 or Mac OS 1.0), it's possible to do this, but with websites, once they've been taken down, no one will ever be able to use their old versions again. I wonder if there's some way that Facebook could "donate" old versions of their code for posterity.
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What Facebook looked like in 2004...
<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.thefacebook.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.theface...</a><p>(Don't forget it started as 'thefacebook.com')
I'd like to notice that the iconic 'Like' button has appeared on FB only in 2009, with acquisition of FriendFeed (recently closed), a social network site which pioneered it.<p>FriendFeed was created by a team led by Paul Buchheit, the original creator of GMail, and Bret Taylor, one of creators of Google Maps.<p>Just a funny fact that shows how much the tech industry is interconnected.
Something interesting is the Facebook still stores all (or most of) these assets, served straight from facebook.com instead of a CDN: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/images/pageheaderbg.gif" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/images/pageheaderbg.gif</a>
Or how about way back when it was still called theefacebook<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20040902031403/http://thefacebook.com/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20040902031403/http://thefacebook...</a>