The virtual archive "Way Back Machine" has been recently pointed out to me by a classmate. Upon entering this seemingly innocent and very basic website is a plethora of information...a virtual encyclopedia of the internet. By simply typing in a website (such as facebook) one can instantly see the face of the website throughout it's evolution. Humble facebook.com and Mark Z. seem to disappear (even before the dreaded "new facebook") to a dowdy site named aboutface.com for office and co-worker use. Four corporate faces stare off the website on March 24, 2004 (when i was a freshman in high school). By August 6, 2005 Mark Zuckerburg's face against the classic blue and white background heralds the new facebook which was then available in only a few State and Ivy league schools. The history of facebook continues of course to include not only college students, but then high school, then corporations, then pretty much anyone...including my ex's parents (which is REALLY creepy).
85 million pages converge on this clustered website and the veiwer is able to see website chronology based on date. The rest of the website is completely uninteresting and is very techy and skeleton-like despite the awesomeness of being able to find what UMBC's website looked like in 2000...the website really doesn't seem that cool or note-worthy, although i did find an audio recording of "Silas Marner" for my English literature class. All in all this website has some interesting functions but the visual presentation is very lacking. Check out websites you loved but you thought was lost.
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3 comments:
I think that website is pretty interesting though not that useful. However it is interesting learning more and more about how facebook came about. I know I hated it as soon as it was open to everyone. I was not even happy when it opened to high schoolers. Though I welcomed facebook with open arms because I really disliked myspace.
I know some people that have actually been able to take advantage of the way back machine in rescuing websites that they once created but were forced to abandon for one reason or another. Apparently it serves as a good backup for certain groups. Although I do agree, the site itself is kind of bleh in usability.
-Matthew Morgal
It's cool that you can now look back on internet pages in similar fashion to that of looking back on archived newspaper articles. I know some of the people who updated the UMBC website in the past years to make it look the way it does, but I do not remember what it looked like before the updates, so it would be interesting to compare the old site to the new site; this site could definitely be used as a future procrastination tool
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