Early screenshots of Twitter ('06), Facebook ('05), and Tumblr ('07)

by panabee • 12 years ago

100 28 12 years ago

panabee• 12 years ago

Initially, it doesn't matter how your product looks if people want it. It would be cool to see early screenshots of other popular services like LinkedIn and Dropbox. Proper credit goes to reddit user, cmdrNacho, as the link was found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1y1f3n/if_you_coul...

patio112• 12 years ago

On the more prosaic end of the scale:

Bingo Card Creator, circa early 2007: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/old-site/index.htm

It doesn't exactly scream "This will certainly sell a quarter million of software, allow you to quit your day job, and fund your software business."

You'd find similar things floating around if you were to look at the early history of most companies which are widely idolized in our space. Nobody ships perfection on day 1. Luckily, customers are happy to pay for imperfect things.

jhh• 12 years ago

has Bingo Card Creator in fact sold 250,000 pcs.?

patio112• 12 years ago

I meant that quote to read as "dollars." My bad. It's at somewhere north of $250k lifetime -- you can probably find it here http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month . (I don't keep tabs on it very often anymore.)

nakkiel• 12 years ago

Honestly, BCC is kind of a mistery around here.

naterator• 12 years ago

Old people, man. And the people who take care of old people. I know it's not typically HN target demographic, but old people need improvements in their lives, too.

scoot• 12 years ago

"sell a quarter million [dollars] of software [over 7 years], allow you to quit your day job, and fund your software business"

Glad for you that your product has given you that freedom, but I don't think there are many devs who would be comfortable quitting a day job for circa $35K gross ARR...

Edit to say: I see from the link elsewhere that you publish your numbers (kudos), and that gross mean ARR for the last 4 years is $51K, which is a passive income I wouldn't say no to! Doesn't change my position on quitting the day job however.

brador4• 12 years ago

I regret not taking a screenshot of http://skimfeed.com at the start. Then I made some DB changes and now I can't remember the colors I used. So it's all weird and orange.

Tip for startups: save! And get that DB right first time.

trentmb• 12 years ago

Do you not use version control?

brador4• 12 years ago

I started using version control later in the process. First few iterations, were live coding/happy-hacking.

jaredsohn2• 12 years ago

archive.org can help with this, too. The earliest for your site is: https://web.archive.org/web/20120908180933/http://skimfeed.c..., which is within a day of when your twitter account was created.

(although this might not be early enough and generally people shouldn't rely on archive.org caching their site.)

brador4• 12 years ago

Yeah i've seen the archive, but that was around iteration 3. Is there anything that snapshots or caches websites that hit HN?

nostrademons• 12 years ago

Google, circa 1998 (I think it was actually mid-1999):

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998

kosei• 12 years ago

Note the prominence of the Invite button on each. On Twitter it's in bright red in the header, Facebook also in the header and for Tumblr it's right below the profile.

pgsandstrom• 12 years ago

Personally I really enjoy reading the first entry on wikipedia for now famous sites. Especially I think facebooks first entry is charming.

Facebook: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Facebook&oldid=338...

Twitter: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Twitter&oldid=1074...

Tumblr: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tumblr&oldid=27832...

cpach• 12 years ago

Thank you, those posts are awesome!

christiangenco• 12 years ago

Oh whoa, I didn't realize Facebook let you see other students in your classes. I wrote a program to do that my freshmen year for your Facebook friends.

photorized• 12 years ago

Two observations:

1. How's simple (one could say crude) these looked back in the day - yet that didn't prevent people from signing up.

2. How quickly things age online - it only takes a few years for your UI to look ancient.

Early screenshots of Twitter ('06), Facebook ('05), and Tumblr ('07)

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