by Shane O'Neill

First-Gen Design of Top Websites and Gadgets

News
Oct 31, 20115 mins
FacebookSmall and Medium BusinessiPhone

What did YouTube look like in 2005? How ugly was the first BlackBerry pager in 1999? Remember Amazon.com when it just sold books? Even the greatest products have awkward beginnings. Let's take a look at your favorite websites and gadgets when they came into the world.

Facebook – 2004

Facebook was famously concocted by the crafty (though some would say shifty) Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room in 2003. The site officially launched in 2004 — then called “The Facebook” — as a bare-bones social network for colleges and universities. Needless to say, Facebook has expanded in the past seven years to be one of the most visited sites on the Web. It currently has over 800 million active users.

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iPod – 2001

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The first iPod model was released on October 23, 2001, and in the decade since has taken on various shapes, colors and sizes. The iPod 1 only had 5GB of storage and looked cumbersome compared to today’s tiny iPod Nanos that have triple the storage space. The iPod 1 was the first MP3 to catch fire with consumers, and with iTunes, released in 2003, Apple transformed how we purchase and listen to music.