John Arends Techno babble

College students built their own “facebook” before Facebook

I graduated from college about a year before Facebook really took off among college students. It was around, but was limited to students of about 15-20 universities. Then fast forward to today and social networking is a big deal and nearly everyone in the world has an account on the service.

College students actually built their own system very similar to Facebook using AOL Instant Messenger as a platform starting in the late 90s. The away message took the place of the status update, and the user profile was where people posted their schedule, inspirational quotes, and the emo kids would post song lyrics that meant something to them.

This of course required leaving a computer powered on and connected to the Internet 24/7, and the only demographic that could really do that consistently were college students living in dorm rooms.

This was not really even that long ago. Most universities actually advised their students against buying laptops in the late 90s/early 00s. The quote was always something along the lines of "Desktop computers are more powerful and a better value for your money, and are less likely to be stolen." The idea was that a laptop was somewhat of an impractical luxury at the time. Laptops had limited utility anyway since only a select number of universities had wireless Internet access, and even the schools that did have it had relatively spotty coverage. Even if you had a laptop, it may or may not have had a wireless card in it. So computers stayed parked on desks.

All across the country, hundreds of thousands of desktop computers were sitting on desks in dorm rooms, fully powered on, running AOL Instant Messenger 24 hours a day 7 days a week so that everyone could see what their friends were up to.

Facebook essentially moved this "service" people hosted on their desktop computers to the cloud.

I'd bet money that the college students of today don't even realize this is how we did it a decade ago.