For a very long time Facebook was just mostly static pages with a list of friends and a "wall" your friends could write on, and maybe, IIRC, photo upload. That's it! It was literally that boring!

Uploading a new profile pic deleted your old one, even. That being said, you could still use Facebook to contact people, if they included their phone number or AIM name, which was accessable to anyone in your college. I was contacted several times this way before Facebook chat/message/whatever else.

I remember when the "mini feed" feature was released, and all it did was list your last 5 or so activities. That was controversial.

The current Facebook shares very little resemblance to the original version, it's very, very fundamentally different from 2004 Facebook.

...yet the original version still got popular.

That being said, the first time. I heard about Facebook was one of those college publications like this one. I wish I could read it today but it was just a student publication that was printed on regular paper and put around campus every once it a while. I remember reading it and being baffled as to why it would be popular. Shortly after that the person I was dating at the time asked me to sign up. That is the only reason I did!

It wasn't that late. At early as 2005, there was a form with the prompt "John Doe is:" and you had to squeeze whatever thoughts you needed your friends to know into that format.

First of all, mini-feed launched in Sep, 2006, according to a TechCrunch post from that time. That was the real time Facebook started to be anything near what it is today, and certainly well before status updates.

I first noticed people using status updates in March 2008, how do I know month and year, you ask? because there was serious shit going on on my life at the time. And I remember reading "X is blah blah blah" for the first time while I was going through my shit. It was new enough to notice. I'll conceed that the "status feature" may have existed a year before I really noticed it, so we are still at early 2007 two years earlier than 2005.

I also do recall the criticism of "you're copying Twitter" as a sibling posted.

I remember using the brand new Facebook chat about April or May 2008, FWIW.

edit: 2006, not 2016.

It's especially weird when I see people roll their eyes or laugh at someone say my grandmother's age referring to it as "the facebook", because to them its quaint and elderly, and I'm tempted to break out the "get off my lawn, that's what it has always been called" speech... Internet history is weird.

there was one screen where you could check on who's online, then you'd write on their wall

The wall was mostly equivalent to scrawling something in a public bathroom, hence the name.

Still remember ATT Mobile in early 2001 had a "find me" service you could use to find your friends. It was like a messenger app you logged into and then it would show you where your friends were located on a google maps interface. Then you could text or chat with him.

They used the example of a guy who wins some concert tickets and wants to invite his friends that are nearby. It showed him logged in and then bringing up the messaging interface and showing three friends all within a few block radius. He sends out a group text about the tickets and they agree to meet at the bar in 15 minutes. I really thought it was a clever use of GPS and felt this was really the future of "smart" phones.

I tried to sell that shit to everybody I knew and everybody instantly freaked about their phone transmitting where they were and how it would violate their privacy, etc, etc.

I guess times have changed huh?