What Facebook Could Have Been

Let me tell you about the time I invented Facebook.

It was 2002, after my second child was born. It had been difficult to keep friends and family up to date with my first, and in the short time between them almost everyone had gone online—friends, parents, even grandparents. I was working professionally as a web developer, so I did what came naturally: I built a website.

I didn’t really invent Facebook, of course. That would come two years later, in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, an origin story repeated so often that it has become mythological. But the family-album website I built had all the trappings of the service, at least in its early days. You could post updates in the form of text and photos. You could invite friends and family so that they could see those updates. They could leave comments on the posts and pictures. It was much easier, more efficient, and less annoying than printing photos, mailing letters, or sending bulk emails.

[Read: Before it conquered the world, Facebook conquered Harvard]

I was hardly alone in this insight. The web had commercialized thanks to advertisers and retailers, but then it began to offer new ways to do daily life. E-commerce had made buying things easier, and email had made