[smeej]

It didn't have a name. It wasn't really a "feature." You just went and posted on their "page" I guess I would call it.

The change to being able to post things on your own page and expecting other people to come to your page and read them (because, again, no Feed) wasn't received well at first.

Keep in mind, smartphones didn't exist yet, and the first ones didn't have selfie cameras even once they did. And the cameras on flip phones were mostly garbage, so if you wanted to show a picture, you had to bring a camera with you, plug it in, and upload it. So at first the Wall basically replaced AIM away messages so you could tell your friends which library you were going to go study in and how long. And this didn't seem problematic, because you were probably only friends with people in your school (it was only open to university students, and not many schools at first), and nobody was mining your data, because there were no business or entity pages.

Simpler, simpler days.

[dcrazy]

I joined Thefacebook in 2005. The place on your page where posts from other people appeared was called the “wall” then.

[smeej]

Yeah, that's about when it changed. The lack of a wall was a very early situation. I joined in 2004, back when it was only open to Ivy League and Boston-area schools.

[djmips]

It was still acceptable to write on someone else's wall when they came to be called that. You can still do that now I think but it's quite uncommon and how it works is now complicated but settings.

[smeej]

Sure, you could. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that now you could post on your own.

That's what turned it from a method of reaching out and sending messages to specific people when you had something to say to them to a means of shouting into the void and expecting (or at least hoping) that someone, somewhere, would see it and care what you had to say. It went from something actively pro-social to something self-focused.

Blogs and other self-focused things already existed, but almost nobody used them for small updates throughout the day. Why do you think the early joke about Twitter was that it was just a bunch of self-absorbed people posting pictures of their lunch? Nobody knew what to do with a tool like that yet, but the creation of that kind of tool has led to an intensity of self-focus and obsession the world had never seen before.