Writing on Someone's Facebook Wall Before Timeline

In September 2004, a few months after Facebook launched for Harvard students, a new box showed up on every profile: the Wall, a space where friends could write messages that anyone looking at the page could read. For years it was the main way people talked to each other on the site. Birthday wishes, inside jokes, plans for Friday night and long conversations all piled up there, newest first. In late 2011, Facebook replaced the old profile and Wall with Timeline, and the way people posted to each other changed for good.

A college thing at first

Facebook began in February 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It spread to other colleges that year, passed a million active users by December, and opened to high school students in September 2005. For a while, you needed a school email address to join, so your Wall was mostly read by people from your campus.

That gave the Wall a different feel from a MySpace comment box. There were no glitter graphics and no custom layouts. Every profile was the same plain blue and white, so the writing had to do all the work.

At first, Wall posts were text only. Facebook didn't let people attach things to Wall posts until July 2007. Before then, you couldn't drop a photo or a video on someone's Wall. You just typed.

What people wrote

Most Wall posts were small. "Are you going tonight?" "You left your jacket in my car." "Happy birthday!!!" Then there were the ones that clearly should have been private messages, like long apologies, breakup fallout and plans to skip class, all posted where anyone could see.

The odd thing was how many people forgot the Wall was public. If you looked at your friend's page, you could read what everyone else wrote to them. Some people even went further and read the posts on the pages of people they barely knew.

Birthdays turned into a wall of identical messages. Facebook reminded everyone, and dozens of people would post "Happy birthday!" the same day. Some wrote one word and some added a joke. A few added three exclamation points, which in 2007 counted as real effort.

Breakups got their own flood of Wall posts, usually right after someone changed their relationship status.

Wall-to-Wall and reading both sides

Since posts lived on the receiving person's Wall, a conversation between two friends was split across two pages. Facebook added a Wall-to-Wall link that showed both sides of a back-and-forth in one place. It was useful, and it was also how people read entire conversations between other people. In May 2008, Facebook limited Wall-to-Wall to the last 40 posts.

There was also a bit of strategy to it. A message on someone's Wall was a way to be seen. Writing on your crush's Wall told them, and all of their friends, that you existed. It was like being the first to say hi when they signed on, except you also had an audience.

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News Feed changed everything

In September 2006, Facebook launched News Feed. Before that, you had to visit someone's profile to see what was new. After it launched, Wall posts and profile changes showed up in a list on your home page. Lots of users were upset and called it a privacy problem, since things that used to sit on a profile were now announced to everyone, audience or no audience.

People eventually got used to it, though it changed how they wrote. When everyone could see your post right away on their home page, you thought a little harder before writing on someone's Wall. Or you didn't, and that was the post people talked about at lunch.

Super Wall and FunWall

In 2007, Facebook let outside developers build apps, and two of the biggest were extra Walls. Slide's FunWall and RockYou's Super Wall let friends post videos, pictures and animated graphics, the kind of thing the regular Wall didn't allow. By the end of November 2007, Super Wall had passed FunWall as the Facebook app with the most active users.

The apps also sent a lot of invites and notifications. In July 2008, Facebook turned off Super Wall's invites and notifications, and its daily users dropped from about 2.4 million to around 600,000 within a month. The regular Wall was enough for most people anyway.

When did Facebook get rid of the Wall?

Facebook replaced the Wall with Timeline in late 2011. Mark Zuckerberg showed it off at the f8 developer conference on September 22, 2011. Timeline rolled out to users around the world that December, and people who held out were moved over not long after. Pages got it in February 2012.

The new layout took some getting used to, and plenty of people posted on each other's Timelines to complain about it, which was a very Facebook thing to do.

Timeline put your whole life on one long scrolling page, with a big cover photo across the top and years listed down the side. Old posts became easy to find, and that caused trouble. In 2012, people scrolling through Timeline found old Wall posts from 2009 and earlier and thought Facebook had leaked their private messages. Facebook said those were Wall posts that had always been public. A lot of people had simply written them back when the site felt smaller and forgot who could read them.

What the Wall box looked like at 2 a.m.

If you used both sites, you'll remember that Facebook pokes made even less sense than Wall posts. Nobody ever agreed on what those were for.

The public note is still around

FriendCrib keeps a comment box on every crib, which works a lot like the old Wall. Friends write something, everyone who visits can read it and you write back on their page. Make a crib if you want to bring that back.

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