My first year on Facebook: we share our early statuses

Facebook is 12 years old today. And some of you might have been 12 years old when it came out. Certainly, you were new to the concept of sharing your life online – the naivete is quaint now – and as a result, your first “status updates” were likely quite embarrassing.

To celebrate Facebook’s latest milestone, our writers have re-shared an emotional moment from the first year of their Facebook account.

I was a bit of a confused scene kid. I think I’d just discovered metal, but I was also having a really great time with the sort of XD emojis that only us real emos used. I straightened my hair a lot at this point.

It wasn’t cool.

I clearly had no idea what the fuck this meant at the time. I was probably just dancing around my room, hyper after eating too many spaceships and thought I’d share Kelis’ banger with my fans. People did ask if I’d been fraped, so I was obviously more classic on Facebook.

This was my mate’s Dad’s pub. Why the kiss?

After I’d watched a Clockwork Orange.

Got there in the end.

I didn’t realise you weren’t meant to share everything on Facebook.

Cool. As an idea it’s hard to pin down, which I guess is the entire point of it. You’d pay good money to be cool all the time. But try too hard to be cool and you come off naff, a poser, a desperado. Don’t try too hard to be cool and, really, you have to ask, what’s the point of being here? Then again maybe not trying to be cool is cool. Or maybe it’s not. Cool is confusing. Is it cool that my first status was simply the word cool? I’ll tell you what wasn’t cool though. This:

The stages of Oxbridge application and rejection. It was a big night at Wetherspoons (y!): I got a Woo Woo and cried.

Even by this point I didn’t have a clue what I was doing on Facebook. This is obviously a cry for attention: letting everyone know my exact whereabouts through my Facebook wall and probably trying to get girls to talk to me. Everyone was still speaking in third person, and I typed in capitals and elongated words like “Hiiiii”. Like most Facebook statuses it got an awkward comment from a family friend to which I didn’t respond.

I’m not sure what I was doing here. The fact that I kept making statuses even though nobody was liking or leaving comments is concerning. I think I might have been counting down exams, which would have been GCSEs at the time. Either that or I was counting down days to my really scene band’s next gig at some grotty pub in my hometown. 

U ok hun? My parents had just moved to Kent. I wasn’t loving it.

Probably would have been better if I had stuck to Bebo ‘tbh’.

2009. Such insight in one so young.

We all know one person who always carries a lighter to help a smoker out. Few of us know a person who does this.

I think I thought Facebook was about putting whatever was on your mind at the time. For some reason in 2010 that was this.

“No offence Meghan”. Girls’ school is cruel.

“Scary biscuits”.

You remember ‘the game’, right? Well, I thought it was the most genius thing ever invented.

So genius, I did it again a month later.