What Facebook looked like 20 years ago is drastically different to what we use today

It's hard to believe it, but Facebook is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

Who knew back in 2004, when it was created by a bunch of Harvard students in a dormitory, that it would become the massive social media phenomenon it is today.

And over the last two decades, the look of Facebook has been constantly changing. Back then, the site was so much more barebones - although that all-important blue and white color scheme was very much present and correct.

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Famously, it also first launched as 'TheFacebook' rather than just 'Facebook' - after all, one of the most iconic parts of David Fincher's movie The Social Network is when Mark Zuckerberg is told to "drop the 'the'. Just Facebook - it's cleaner".

Plus, when the site first arrived it didn't have perhaps the single most iconic part of its web presence - the wall, which launched quite soon afterwards.

This was basically your profile's central page, made up of everyone's posts, thoughts and images sent to you - your one-stop way to catch up with what everyone had been up to.

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Of course, at this point, the site was also primarily aimed at university students, and it would take a couple of years before it became available worldwide.

From there, it's a more familiar picture as massive crazes like Farmville took over the platform before subsiding, and the feed of posts and news steadily became more algorithmically organized, moving away from a straight timeline.

The Newsfeed became the default way to interact with Facebook, and after around 2010 the site started to look a lot more recognizable to those who use it today, albeit with way less elegant design and far fewer features (and therefore a little less clutter, some would say).

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Still, taking a look at those early versions of the site it's hard not to get nostalgic for how simple and blocky it all is, and how limited Facebook's scope was for many of us.

Of course, there is now a whole generation of teenagers who never even glimpsed this period in the world's biggest social network's growth. So, to them this is doubtless more of a time capsule to a bygone era.

All of this was before Facebook became Meta, before Messenger - and before it bought and integrated Instagram. It was a simpler time!