What Facebook, Google+ and YouTube would have looked like in 1997

What's the point of this. Just see what they actually looked like <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular-websites-looked-when-they-launched.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6125914/How-20-popular...</a><p>It's not like the 'fake' ones are particularly funny or anything.

You know, there were actually good designers in the late 90s and HTML and CSS were reasonably mature.

Sites like these always trigger an upswell of nostalgia for me. Looking at these old screenshots I can remember how hip I felt after installing Netscape Communicator and browsing various sites. Perl was the new frontier.<p>The Internet still seemed like something you could wrap your head around in its entirety, if you tried.

Link to a link - Direct source: <a href="http://1x-upon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://1x-upon.com/</a>

I love the would-be prankster on the Facebook page, trying to sneak an alert("Delete C:/?") onto the page.

What is this nonsense about google? The domain was registered in 97 and launche in 98 <a href="http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google" rel="nofollow">http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google</a><p>[edit: my mistake, google+]

I like 1997 YouTube better.

Since others are handling the arguments over technical and stylistic aspects, I will comment on another problem with the Facebook dedesign:<p>Pokemon was not yet popular in 1997. The anime scene was all about Ranma, Slayers, Evangelion, Techni Muyo, and whatever movie had aired on the Sci-Fi channel the past Saturday. Sailor Moon was running on TV and was very popular but we tried to forget about that. Of course, the user could be from Japan where Pokemon had been running for half a year, or they could have gotten a sub off Usenet, but Pokemon did not get popular in the English-speaking world until the dub was aired later in the decade.

The real name policy was a defining feature of Facebook. A site that doesn't have that can hardly be called the same thing.