This past Saturday during lunchtime, I had the pleasure of sharing a meal in the company of my new friend Charlie.  We carried out the awkward and now-exhausted series of questions that marginally count as a conversation between two freshman Princetonians; looking back, these were all tidbits I could have gleaned from Charlie’s Facebook profile, and he from mine.

We carried on the conversation-slash-interview as two chatty graduate students sat down beside us.  Without intention our conversations gradually merged, until the older students revealed that they had originally met as undergraduates at Harvard.  Charlie politely asked how their undergraduate experience was, and somewhere amidst the prattle about picking a major and being homesick, one of the students mentioned “that whole Zuckerberg-Facebook thing” from their freshman year.

Pause. Rewind. WHAT?!

Charlie and I stared in gaping fascination as they told their accounts of how Facebook (then “The Facebook”) spread through the campus.  In my mind these two graduate students, who I likely would have forgotten about a few hours later in a normal context, became celebrities.  They were among the first 2,000 people to have a Facebook account. Repeat: they were among the first 2,000 people to have a Facebook account, which now boasts between 800 and 900 million active users, depending on your source.

The conversation exploded in questions from Charlie and I, mainly of comparisons between the original Facebook experience and the current one.  And here’s the meat of this blog post.  Two major themes stood out to me from the grad students’ accounts of how Facebook has transformed, for better and for worse.

The first is that Facebook has become strikingly detached since 2005.  These graduate students described an atmosphere in which people wrote intimate letters to each other in Facebook messages, and where birthday wall posts looked similar to what one would write to a close friend in their senior yearbook.  The “about” section was a big to-do, as it would define the user on a personal level.  There were no advertisements or pages to “like”.  One would only add close friends to be a part of their privileged “friend list,” rather than the tidal wave of people who barely count as acquaintances that we see today.  So if Facebook truly has become an impersonal smorgasbord of effortless birthday posts, gossip pages, and consumer-driven advertising, is that really an improvement?  Facebook is praised for being inventive and creative in the ways that it has allowed connections to thrive all over the world, but at what point does ingenuity lose genuineness?

The second theme of the conversation included the formatting changes that Facebook has made, and the virtual uproar that each has caused.  One grad student noted, “I remember when The Wall first came out – everyone went crazy.”  Before that time, one’s entire Facebook profile was the “about” section, their pictures, and their relationship status, with the option to message that user.  Now, all of those functions are secondary to The Timeline.  With each major function that Facebook has added – The Wall and “wall posts”, The Newsfeed and a scrolling newsfeed in the upper-right corner, a “like” button, instant messaging, event and celebrity pages, The Timeline and cover photos – users have caused an uproar in protest.  Yet each of these functions has now been thoroughly integrated into the normal Facebook experience, and I for one couldn’t imagine “facebooking” without many of them.  Are these mini-uproars justified, or are they just an excuse to post on a slow news day?  Should Facebook take these concerns seriously or continue to do what they think is best for the format of the user experience?  As Facebook continues to add and remove more features to their web and mobile sites, at one point will there be no more room for progression?  Or, will that point never come, and Facebook will continue to “improve” their user experience exponentially?

P.S. Apparently Donna Zuckerberg, Mark’s sister, is a CURRENT grad student in the classics department.  Be on the lookout!