Twelve Years Later, Life After Facebook

The Washington Post - Yanan Wang

Just over a decade ago, students at a smattering of elite colleges were debating the merits of a new website called thefacebook.com. It was all the rage at Harvard, naturally, where it had been launched by a sophomore who “literally” made it in a week.

“I’m just like a little kid,” Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson in 2004. “I get bored easily and computers excite me. Those are the two driving factors here.”

The other students on campus were pretty excited, too. Within weeks of going online, the site offering a “visualization of your social network” gain...