[wodenokoto]

They had the news feed back then too, although it looked very differently. The two major differences between fb and myspace was the forced layout and that you didn't have to browse the site to see if there were updates on friends walls.

The major difference is what people are posting, and how tangentially related to your network, the posts on your newsfeed are.

Back then celebrities and news media weren't part of the platform, so you didn't really have these major intersections in the graph. I also believe that you had to re-share in order to push a post into a node that isn't directly connected to the posts author. Today a like is enough.

The reason why facebook is uncool now, is a mix between who the active users are, and how much room and focus facebook puts on links to newssite and posts by people who aren't your friends.

[pxlpshr]

This is exactly how I feel as an end-user over the same time period to the point that I don't even login anymore except for work. It's exhausting and it's no longer about the projected vision of "connecting people", it's about connecting people to content and other monetizable assets as a first-order priority in everything they do and touch.

This is why Facebook/IG is unrecoverable to me as a destination for connecting with the people I care about. Instead, it's become iMessage and I'm quite happy about that. No ads and the conversations/photos are a lot more authentic compared with social media.

I still love social media as a form (I think), it's just become more media and less social.