Original Facebook, YouTube and Google – here’s what all your favourite apps USED to look like
The internet used to be a weird and confused place – and in many ways, it still is – so here's a look at what your top apps used to look like when they first launched
THE apps and websites of today are attractive and streamlined, but it wasn't always so.
We've used the Wayback Machine web tool to take a trip down the internet's memory lane, revealing what your favourite apps used to look like – including Facebook, Google, and YouTube.
Twitter turned over an incredible $2.53 billion last year, which is incredible considering how rubbish it used to look.
The website was spawned out of a brainstorming session, masterminded by then-student Jack Dorsey, who mooted the idea of an SMS service that could be used to message a small group of people.
Twitter eventually went public in July 2006, and the rest is history.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a mere baby by Twitter's standards, launching as recently as 2011.
But even though it's less than a decade old, Snapchat's original website hasn't aged well. The old app looks hideous, but it's been revamped since then.
What Snapchat did keep, however, was the iconic ghost mascot, which is nicknamed 'Ghostface Chillah' – after rapper Ghostface Killah, of Wu-Tang Clan fame.
Facebook is a social media powerhouse, serving more than two billion users globally every single month.
Not bad, considering it began as a rubbish website built by student Mark Zuckerberg that let you compare the "hotness" of Harvard students. It eventually became TheFacebook – a basic social network – in February 2004, and has ballooned in size ever since.
Uber
Uber is a global taxi giant, ferrying its customers around 633 cities spread out across the globe.
It's an impressive feat given that it only launched back in 2009 as a small localised app that served San Francisco with black luxury cars that cost 1.5x the price of a normal taxi.
Spotify
Spotify is the world's most famous music-streaming app, and has been blasting out the tunes since October 2008.
It began as a small Swedish start-up that has since grown to a media giant that employs 1,600 staff and turns over $2.18 billion a year.
Google is the oldest company on this list, hailing back to the early days of the web.
In the dark days of 1998, Google provided an easy way for people to trawl the vast world wide web for content that they might enjoy, fending off fierce competition from the likes of search titan AskJeeves...
Google is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, and employs over 70,000 staff worldwide.
Instagram is a staple of online culture these days, adored by snap-happy users across the world.
The first Instagram photo was shared on July 16, 2010, but the app didn't actually land on Apple's App Store until October that year.
In 2012 it eventually arrived on Android phones, and was downloaded more than a million times in one day.
YouTube
YouTube feels like it's been around forever, but it actually only debuted online in 2005.
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The company was founded by former PayPal employees who wanted to make it easier to share videos.
These days, users uploaded more than 400 hours of content to YouTube per minute, with one billion hours of content watched every day.
It's ranked as the second most popular website in the world by web traffic and, thankfully, it looks much better these days.