Gallery: Facebook is five today. See how it's evolved

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On Friday 4th February 2005, Facebook was born. Initially designed as a way for students to connect online, the past five years has seen it grow into a huge social network with a huge variety of people connecting with friends, relatives and complete strangers on a daily basis.

In his blog post, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote:

While we at Facebook make products that enable people to share information efficiently, Facebook is mostly the product of the people who use it. Without you and the connections you make to others, the products we create wouldn’t have much meaning. So we feel fortunate to have all of you with us. To express our appreciation, we’ve created a “Thank You” gift, which will be available tomorrow in the Facebook Gift Shop for you to to give freely to others. In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook.

Take a wander through the past five years and see how Facebook has evolved…

The internet is making your brain better and creating a new master race of geeks

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Good at filtering information but only have pretend friends you’ve never met in real life? That’s good! That means you have evolved. You are better than other people. You are the next level of mankind.

That is according to neuroscientist Gary Small, who reckons that our brains are already changing and evolving thanks to modern technology. 24/7 access to facts, trivia about Star Trek, text messages and weather forecasts is making People 2.0 better at filtering out rubbish data from useful fact, making us all much better at instantly deciding what to keep/remember and what to bin/forget…

Humans hit evolutionary limit – here's how SCIENCE should intervene and make man BETTER

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According to some scientist, humans have stopped evolving. This means we’re not going to get any better – at least not naturally.

So I propose science steps in to make us better, seeing as Mother Nature can’t be bothered any more. Here’s how. These are the evolutionary steps scientists need to introduce to our gene pool ASAP.

1. SIDE EYES
Seeing as our ears are always in use listening to MP3s of 1980s cover versions, it’s hard to hear cars, bicycles and lorries coming toward you. I therefore suggest moving our eyes to the sides of our heads, like horses, so we’re less likely to step out in front of buses because we can’t hear them coming. You never hear about horses never get run over because they’re too busy listening to the new Oasis album to listen out for cars, do you?

2. WIDER EAR CANALS
Dunno about you, but my ear holes are never big enough to accommodate all these so-called “in ear” earphones. You know, the ones you’re supposed to ram right in. I ram them in so hard it hurts and my brain pops, yet they still fall out after three minutes when the cable snags on my shirt. I therefore suggest we evolve wider ear holes for better audio clarity and comfort “on the go”…

Sporegasm: Creationists and gamers angered but Maxis release game prototypes to quell the riots

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This is three stories in one really, so I apologise in advance for the length of this post. The three things I’m about to cover are as follows: Creationists are trying to ban Spore in the USA due to its evolutionary content, video-game fans are slamming EA and refusing to buy the game due to its DRM system, and EA have released a bunch of early prototypes of different aspects of the game….