Serendipity35

 

Mark Zuckerberg was testifying recently in a landmark antitrust trial brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Meta. The FTC alleges that Meta, through its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, has unfairly maintained a monopoly in the social networking market. The government claims these purchases were part of a strategy to "neutralize" competitors and stifle innovation

I wrote a post here in 2006 when Facebook first became available to the general public. Initially, it was launched in 2004 as "TheFacebook" and was limited to Harvard students. Over time, it expanded to other universities and eventually opened up to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address in 2006. I have repurposed that old post here in an updated version.

I jumped in right away. I was at a university, and I immediately thought this would be big with students, and that the faculty needed to know what it was about. The faculty was not interested in the presentations I offered. I did one on "social media" and where it was headed.

Facebook wasn't the first or the only player.

• MySpace was very popular at the time, and it was the go-to platform for music lovers and personal profiles.
• YouTube launched in 2005 and was gaining traction as the place for video sharing.
• Flickr was the favorite for photo sharing and had amateur as well as professional photographers.
• LinkedIn: Focused on professional networking, it was already carving out its niche.
• Friendster's popularity was waning, but it was still a notable player in the early social media scene.
• The lesser-known Orkut gained popularity in Brazil and India but not in the U.S. It was Google's failed attempt at social networking.

In 2004, the soon-to-be social networking giant was a baby called "The Facebook.” The19-year-old co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg needed to explain the concept behind the site,. Check out this explanation he did in his first-ever television interview with CNBC on April 28, 2004.

In my 2006 post, I wrote about the American fascination with turning nouns into verbs, so for a time people were saying that you could be "facebooked."  That verb meant the action of 1) looking someone up on Facebook or 2) asking someone to be your friend on Facebook.
"I Facebooked that girl I met at the party last night, and she Facebooked me this morning, so now we're friends."

You could also "poke" someone which was a suggestive term for a kind of gentle message without content. You could send an email-style message to them or leave a message on their "wall."

It is interesting to read what Zuckerberg said 19 years ago about the website and consider where it is today. The definition of Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2006:

"The idea for the website was motivated by a social need at Harvard to be able to identify people in other residential houses. Harvard is a fairly unfriendly place. While each residential house listed directories of their residents, I wanted one online directory where all students could be listed. And I've always enjoyed building things and puttering around with computer code, so I sat down and in about a week I had produced the basic workings of the site. 
We had a launch plan to enter into other colleges based on where friends would be most likely to overlap, so the site spread organically based upon that model, and now we operate on a broad spectrum of campuses. It doesn't make sense to exclude anybody or any college from the resources that Facebook offers. This is a product that should be fun and useful for all college students.
We don't view the site as an online community. We bill it as a directory that is reinforcing a physical community. What exists on the site is a mirror image of what exists in real life.
To a certain extent, the website is unfortunate because it oversimplifies things. Everybody's concept of having a friend is different. It can definitely blur the relationships that exist between people. But in the end, I think that thefacebook can only reinforce preexisting communities. We think we have been particularly successful in strengthening those relationships that exist between people who are only “fringe friends.
It's not unusual for us to receive an email from somebody saying, "I spend all of my time on your website and now I have less of a social life than I had before." We would much rather have people meet people through the website and go out and party than stay at home on a Friday night reading other people's profiles. And it's surprising, but we have actually received far less complaints about stalking than we otherwise would have expected."

Here are some of my 2006 stats about Facebook:
- 12 million users (*MySpace has 54 million users)
- 300 million page views per 24-hour period - page views surpasses Google
- Facebook comes in seventh in terms of overall traffic on the entire Web
- 70% of users use the site every day
- 85% use it once a week
- 93% visit monthly
- The site makes more than a million dollars a month in ad revenue
- Since its start, a high school edition and a photo upload and tagging option were added

I joined Facebook mostly to see what it was all about. I knew that my college-aged sons both used it. (It seemed like my younger son - a freshman in 2005 - met a hundred people at his school through Facebook during orientation and the first weeks, plus all his high school friends at other schools that were added to his friends list, and then their friends who added him.

I felt pretty sad at first because I had no one to add to my list. I started with my sons, who "allowed" me to be their friend list (you do have to approve someone's request to be added), though they made me promise never to put something on their wall. Facebook was not really for mom and dad.

Because early on, parents and adults played no real role in Facebook (though alumni can create accounts for their alma mater) I didn't expect to find any of my classmates there. Faculty could have a profile at their school, but that was rare in 2006.

What really bothered me at first was that my profile said, "You have 0 friends at NJIT." I planned to do a presentation to faculty at NJIT about this new website, so I had to Facebook a few students that I thought would say yes to my request. Then I started searching students I had taught in my former K-12 days. Found a few and sent them a message. And that led to a few of their classmates finding me. Social networking...

When I did my first presentation, I had 37 friends - which by Facebook standards was pretty pathetic. It for younger readers to imagine these early social media ( aterm no one was using) times. I only had 55 people on my AOL AIM buddy list, so 37 seems was about right.

When I showed the site to faculty and academic and non-academic friends, the most common comments were:
Yeah. So what's the point? [Remember, most of my friends are old.]
Why does everyone seem to have an alcoholic drink in their hand in all the pictures? [sad but true]
Many more females than males on Facebook. [True]
Wouldn't it scare you if you had a daughter and she was posting pictures, her dorm room #, email address and other info online? [Yes}
Doesn't it scare you that your sons are doing that? [To a degree - but maintaining a common double standard, not as much.]
What about identity theft? [As with any sitaution where you reveal personal information, facebook could open you up to id theft by giving someone enough information to attempt to create a fake account.]

One comment I heard did turn out to be true later that year. "Don't you think employers will check this kind of site when screening clients?" I had heard that but I doubted it would be widespread. It turned out that employers could get access through employees who were students, faculty and alumni from an applicant's school. I saw a posting that said "Monster.com [a very popular jobs site in 2006] is who you portray you are, but Facebook is who you really are."

In the fall of 2005, North Carolina State University disciplined several students for underage drinking after a resident assistant found party photos of them on Facebook. A few days after students rushed the football field following a Penn State win over Ohio State, campus police found pictures of the incident containing identifiable students on Facebook. Northern Kentucky and the University of Kentucky both have disciplined students they had seen drinking in pictures posted on Facebook. Campus police at George Washington University use Facebook to find underage drinkers. Employers and the career center at the University of Kansas use Facebook to evaluate students being considered for KU jobs.

People commented that "You can't seriously think that these people actually have 345 "friends?" Well, not the way we may have once defined "friend." I'm pretty confident that someone who has 345 friends on Facebook realizes that they are not friends in the same way as their 6 close friends that they see face-to-face regularly.

In 2006, I Facebooked Mark Zuckerberg. He had 323 friends already, but hey, you can always use another friend, right?

I saw that today is the anniversary of the start of Facebook back in its undergraduate days of 2004. An old post on the now-defunct Writer's Almanac did a nice job of summarizing that early history, so I am using most of it here.

The social networking site Facebook was launched from a Harvard University dorm room on February 4, 2004 by  sophomore Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room (Suite H33 in Kirkland House). He was aided by three other 19-year-olds.

Zuckerberg was a smart, middle-class kid from Dobbs Ferry, New York who started writing computer software when he was 12. In high school, he created a program called Synapse Media Player and was offered millions of dollars for the product and job offers by both Microsoft and AO. But he passed on them in order to attend Harvard instead.

The program he created at Harvard was called Facemash. It displayed two student photos side by side and asked people to rank who was hotter. It would later be duplicated in various forms as a "hot or not" game. In the site’s first four hours online, the photos were viewed 22,000 times. The site was shut down by Harvard a few days later. It so popular that it overwhelmed their server, but also because there were privacy violations since Zuckerberg had acquired the photos for Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s photo directory.

A couple of months later, Zuckerberg began writing code for a site that would allow students to view each other’s photos and some basic personal information. This site, TheFacebook, was launched on this day in 2004 at www.thefacebook.com.

More than a thousand students signed up within 24 hours, and after a month, half of Harvard’s undergraduates had signed up. Zuck was in trouble again, this time with three seniors who claimed that they had hired Zuckerberg to create a similar site, but that Mark had stolen their idea. Several years later, they reached a multimillion-dollar settlement.

In an article by S.E. Smith on The Verge, the author says that "Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty."

A recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. Pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish. This happens with personal website and blogs but also with scientific journals and local news sites.

Yes, there are places like the wonderful Internet Archive that tries to preserve some sites and pages, but even that is incomplete if their archived version links to a dead page. I can find some archived versions of my own logs and websites in that archive but it is hardle complete. A complete archive would be an impossible task.

The article was titled What happens when the internet disappears? but the Internet itself is not disappearing, though significant prts of it are already gone.

During my time working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, I had quite robust personal website. This blog actually was hosted there at the beginning. Thankfully, Tim and I moved Serendipity35 before both of us left the university. I was able to change links on my website to point to new locations of mine, but although for some reason my webspace still is online, I don't have privileges to change anything anymore. That means that things that are out of date or just plain wrong are still there - and people do find those pages.

A page I have there about some early experimenting I did with the crude chatbot ELIZA was found by a researcher writing about the chatbot's history, and a producer from BBC Radio found it and did an interview with me about it for a program. I wish I could update it, but that's not possible on that server.

Smith says in that article "Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives."

Books and letters crumble, artwork disintegrates and photography fades, and though we try to save the most important things, we don't know what will be important in the next century.

Do you remember the Y2K scare? It is also known as the Millennium Bug. On this Eve of a new year, I am recalling this scare that stemmed from a widespread concern in the late 1990s that many computer systems would fail when the year changed from 1999 to 2000.

Why? Many older computer systems and software programs represented years using only the last two digits (e.g., "1999" was stored as "99"). It was feared that when 2000 arrived, these systems might interpret "00" as 1900 instead of 2000, leading to several problems.

Systems that relied on accurate date calculations could produce errors or fail entirely. For example, financial systems calculating interest rates or loan payments might miscalculate. Concerns arose about critical systems in utilities, transportation, healthcare, and government shutting down. Files or databases might become corrupted due to incorrect data processing.

Probably the greatest concern was in banking and finance where it was feared that miscalculated transactions, stock market crashes, or ATM malfunctions might occur.

Some people predicted power grid failures or water system disruptions, and aviation navigation systems and air traffic control collapsing.

What if there were malfunctioning military systems, including nuclear launch systems?

And so, billions of dollars were spent worldwide to identify, update, and test potentially vulnerable systems. IT professionals worked tirelessly to ensure compliance before the deadline.

What Happened? The transition to the year 2000 was largely uneventful. A few minor issues were reported, but there were no catastrophic failures. It wasn't that there was no reason to be concerned, but the successful outcome is often credited to the massive preventive effort rather than the fears being overblown.

The Y2K scare highlighted the importance of forward-thinking in software development and helped establish rigorous practices for handling date and time in computing. If you want to start preparing or worrying now for the next similar scare, the Y2K38 Problem (Year 2038 Issue) arises from how older computer systems store time as a 32-bit integer, counting seconds since January 1, 1970 (Unix time). On January 19, 2038, this count will exceed the maximum value for a 32-bit integer, causing a rollover that could result in misinterpreted dates or system crashes. This potentially affects embedded systems, infrastructure, and older software. Modern systems are increasingly being updated to 64-bit time representations, which kicks the problem far into the future.