mcc, I had no idea this existed. It was cursed and I love it.

That last point reminds me of VK's flash and iframe apps. It's a thing you could add to your profile as a link in the publicly visible "apps" section. Your friends would also see that "Gregory installed app Florb" in their feeds. An app was just a separate page that included either an swf you uploaded or an iframe pointed at the URL you set in the app settings. It got some parameters like the ID of the user looking at the app and the user from whose profile it was launched. There was an API but initially you couldn't do very much. Still, there was so much experimentation with it! It was delightful. At some point you could post app content on people's walls. It showed up as an image that you could click and the app would open in a modal and display whatever you posted. And then... it was all nerfed eventually. You could no longer see other people's apps, apps they installed wouldn't show up in the feed, and you couldn't post those embeds on walls. I want to eventually recreate this experience here on Smithereen. I feel like it's an important part of that person-to-person social media that I'm trying to build.