While the rest of the world was busy arguing over AI ethics and the latest viral VR trends, the man who started it all decided to keep things aggressively simple.

Yesterday (4 February), Mark Zuckerberg or “The Zuck”, as the internet’s collective consciousness prefers, took a break from being a tech titan to post a single screenshot and a cake emoji.

The image? A pixelated, 2004-era time capsule of “Thefacebook.”

The caption? A minimalist “Happy Birthday, Facebook 🎂”. To which, Facebook’s own verified profile replied, “time flies when you’re having fun”.

Just like that, the $1.7 trillion man reminded us that it’s been 22 years since we all agreed to trade our privacy to see what our high school friends had for lunch.

Low-res Al Pacino

The screenshot shared by Zuckerberg is a jarring reminder of how the internet used to look: a blue-and-white interface that claimed to be “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.”

Back then, it was exclusive to Harvard, and “social networking” was a term that still required an explanation.

In 2004, the site featured a tiny, low-res header of a man (reportedly Al Pacino) and a lot of empty space.

There was no “Poke,” no “Marketplace,” and definitely no “Metaverse”.

It was just a digital phonebook for college students who wanted to see if their crush was “In a Relationship” or “It’s Complicated”.

The glow-up

Fast forward to February 2026, and that “online directory” has morphed into a global behemoth that dictates everything from election cycles to grandmother’s birthday reminders.

Since dropping the “The” in 2005 (at the cost of a cool $200,000 for the domain then), the platform has become the cornerstone of a digital empire that includes Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and an increasingly sentient artificial intelligence known as Llama 4.

With over three billion monthly active users, Facebook isn’t just an app anymore; it’s practically a sovereign digital state.

Zuckerberg’s nostalgic post serves as a dryly humorous contrast: the $1.75 trillion Meta of today versus the dorm-room project that probably once ran on a single server and a lot of caffeine.

Still blue, still there

Despite two decades of “deleted” campaigns, privacy scandals that could fill a library, and the rise of short-form video competitors, the “Blue Giant” remains the internet’s default setting.

While the younger generation might treat Facebook like a digital museum for their parents’ political rants, Zuckerberg’s post reminds us that the platform is, quite literally, the foundation of modern social interaction.

With Facebook entering its early twenties, it seems to be having a midlife transformation, pivoting from “likes” to “neural integrations” and “spatial computing”.

But for one day, it was just about a blue screen and a birthday cake.