Facebooks is like Geocities..and Ning is like Yahoo Groups. If you take a look at the feature differences between Geocities and Facebook, you'll realize that (horrors), there are few real ones. The way geocities worked was that people would create a home page, say something about themselves and upload their pictures to that page (ie they had a profile). Their friends could leave comments on a guestbook (now fondly referred to as a 'wall') , and people often had links to their friends' geocities pages thereby plotting a Social Graph.

There were no mobile updates which is ok, considering most people did not have mobile phones.

Alas, there were no REST, PHP or Javascript APIs...oh wait, the users did not care then, and still don't care that facebook has them.

Geocities did have sophisticated multimedia capabilities for the time it existed.

A 1980 honda is as much a car as a 2007 Ferarri.

Facebook, myspace, hi5, orkut, friendster, dogster etc are all improved versions of geocities..and Ning is yahoo groups in disguiuse

Well said. They're all important steps in the evolution of information exchange. Facebook is a lot better than Geocities as long as you don't want to design a web page, but Geocities was clearly an enormous first step towards internet sociality.