Facebook is celebrating its 10th birthday today, and there are a couple of ways for you to join the party.
The social networking monolith has created a personalised video of every user's time on the site. Your 'Look Back' compilation contains roughly 15 of your most-liked photos, statuses and life events, set to treacly, sentimental music. They're cheesy as hell, but you have to appreciate the effort FB went to here — a small team spent months ensuring hundreds of millions of HD videos would be ready for the big day.
If you haven't received yours yet, expect to get a notification at some point today that will take you to your video. If that sounds a little too much like 'waiting' to you, you can head to this page right now to watch your clip and remind yourself of how obnoxious you were 10 years ago.
Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg in The Social NetworkOn a more horrifying note, the tech editors at Time have built a Facebook Time Machine that can tell you (roughly) how much time you've wasted on Facebook over the past 10 years.
Now, you might object to their use of the term 'wasted' here — surely keeping in touch with friends, family and that one guy you met that one time at that one place is a valuable use of your time, after all.
But the fact is, unless you're 10 years old or younger, Facebook did not exist for at least some portion of your life and you were perfectly happy in those days; you lived, you loved, you kept your phone in your pocket at social gatherings, you never completed a Buzzfeed quiz. It isn't really essential.
At least some of the time we've spent on Facebook has been wasted time, then, and that's okay — to paraphrase Win Butler, if we could have it back, all that time we wasted, we'd only waste it again.
We'd love to waste it again.
