The changing face of Facebook: From Al Pacino to poking

But even if the big F hasn’t changed much, everything else has.

What started as a simple site to connect with friends and share your thoughts has exploded into an all-consuming, society-changing monster.

It wasn’t much, at first.

Early profiles gave off major Windows 95 vibes – flat,. You could update your status, check out other people’s profiles, add friends. That was pretty much it.

Then came the wall. People could leave messages. You could reply.

Better yet, they could poke you, and you could poke them back.

Believe it or not, you can still poke people on Facebook to this day – there’s now a dedicated ‘pokes’ page.

There were also ‘gifts’, little bundles of pixels that were literally worthless but let people know someone you were thinking about them. 

Feeling sad after a break-up? Have a donkey.

You got a new job! Here’s a lollipop.

Sorry your hamster died. Would some digital french fries help?

Facebook adopted ads relatively early on, in 2007. Two years later we were treated to the ‘Like’ button, and a whole new world of social media angst, fuelled by a paranoia and a growing desperation for emoji-driven dopamine hits.

How many people would like your post? And more importantly, who? Worse still, you just accidentally liked a post from the hot guy in your class from months ago. 

But likes as cachet would soon spread beyond the screens of Facebook and change the internet as we knew it. Sometimes under a different guise – an upvote, a thumbs up, even a pageview – but the transformation of the web into a popularity contest was turbocharged by that one word.

Incidentally, rumour has it that during development the button was possibly going to say ‘awesome’, but presumably execs realised ‘I just awesomed your post’ didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Not until 2016 could we react to content using the full gamut of human emotion. Well, the full gamut of human emotion distilled into five emojis – ‘Love’, ‘Haha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’, or ‘Angry’. They became six during the pandemic, when Facebook added ‘Care’.

Perhaps this is a sign of how much Facebook has changed us. In the 1960s, if you received a heartfelt letter from a friend about the passing of their mother, it would absolutely not be acceptable to respond with a massive sad face scrawled on some A4.

Yet now, seeing those little yellow faces pop up can offer a modicum of solace, knowing others know you’re going through something and are there for you, should you need them.

Or maybe people still think it’s unacceptably lazy, your call really.

It could also just be a sign of 21st century fatigue. Thanks to Facebook and those that followed, we’re constantly bombarded with information, tasks, messages, anything and everything demanding our attention.

When Facebook promoted its news feed front and centre, there was outrage. Users felt they were being fed information they didn’t want. Facebook was about friends and family, what people were up to, photos, memories. Not news and politics.

Well, we all know how that’s going. Facebook’s influence on society is a whole other thing we don’t have time to get into now, but its news feed remains the central pillar around which the platform is built.

A runway of content that no matter how far or for how long you scroll, will simply never end.