These days, it’s hard to imagine life without Facebook. In the biz, it’s a topic of conversation every day, and for others, it’s just an unavoidable entity – an obsession. But we did live without Facebook (and MySpace and Friendster, et al.). Remember the ‘90s, when all we had were forums, ICQ and creepy AOL chat rooms? Well, Squirrel-Monkey would like us to imagine if Facebook, or “The Facebook” were on the “World Wide Web” back then. In their video (below), the narrator walks viewers through an ultra low-tech version of “The Facebook” as if teaching them to use it for the first time. On how to upload a profile picture:
“If you don’t have a scanner, you can send your picture to The Facebook company and in only one month, they put your digital picture online.”
The video goes on to show a new and improved, neon (of course) version of The Facebook after Timeline is activated and reminds viewers, that “you can also lose friends, or friends who were never really your friends.” Watch and be amazed / appalled: While I was thinking of the various pages I would have ‘liked’ in the ‘90s (My So Called Life, MTV Music Videos, Nirvana…), the whole concept made me wonder how other sites would look in the ‘90s. I had some idea, having made plenty of Geocities “web pages” in my day. But I was not prepared for what The Geocities-izer served up as the ’90s Nina Hale website:
Scary! While there will always be a place in my heart for the cast of 90210, I am glad we’ve moved beyond tiled backgrounds and animated GIFs.
