Check out how Facebook, Google+ and YouTube would have looked & worked in 1997

Once Upon is a brilliant project that has recreated three popular sites from today as if they were built in the dial-up era, in 1997.

Witness Facebook, with no real-names policy and photos displayed in an ugly grey table; YouTube, with a choice of encoding options to select before you watch a video, and Google+, where Circles of contacts are displayed as far easier to render squares. Be prepared for a wait though – the recreations are limited to 8kbps transfer speeds, as if you were loading it on a particularly slow dial-up connection.

This is perhaps the most extreme version of Web nostalgia we’ve seen. On a related note, these imaginings of what online social networking would have been like in centuries gone by are worth a look. Also, our report on 10 websites that changed the world is worth reading- they’re not what you might expect.

➤ Once Upon