Creator of Facebook
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Eduardo Saverin
- Dustin Moskovitz
- Chris Hughes
-: History:-
Mark Zuckerberg
wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while
attending Harvard as
a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson,
the site was comparable to Hot or Not, and
"used photos compiled from the online Facebook of nine houses, placing
two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter'
person"
Mark Zuckerberg
co-created Facebook in his Harvard
dorm room.
To accomplish
this, Zuckerberg hacked
into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses'
private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not
have a student "facebook"
(a directory with photos and basic information), though individual houses had
been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s. Facemash attracted
450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.
The site was
quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few
days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the
administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual
privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg
expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool
ahead of an art history
final, by uploading 500 Augustan
images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section. He
opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.
The following
semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He
was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the
Facemash incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched
"Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
Six days after
the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss,
Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of
intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social
network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead
using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to the Harvard
Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a
lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.
Membership was
initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first
month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on
the service. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer),
Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris
Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004,
Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia,
and Yale. It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University,
MIT,
and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.
Facebook was incorporated
in mid-2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally
advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook
moved its base of operations to Palo Alto,
California.
It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The company dropped The
from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for
$200,000.
Total active users
|
|||
Date
|
Users
(in millions) |
Days later
|
Monthly growth
|
August 26, 2008
|
100
|
1,665
|
178.38%
|
April 8, 2009
|
200
|
225
|
13.33%
|
September 15, 2009
|
300
|
160
|
9.38%
|
February 5, 2010
|
400
|
143
|
6.99%
|
July 21, 2010
|
500
|
166
|
4.52%
|
January 5, 2011
|
600
|
168
|
3.57%
|
May 30, 2011
|
700
|
145
|
3.45%
|
September 22, 2011
|
800
|
115
|
3.73%
|
April 24, 2012
|
900
|
215
|
1.74%
|
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high-school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.
On October 24,
2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for
$240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around
$15 billion. Microsoft's purchase included rights to place
international ads on Facebook. In October 2008, Facebook announced that it
would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. In September 2009, Facebook said that it had
turned cash-flow positive for the first time. In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares
of privately held companies, Facebook's value was $41 billion (slightly
surpassing eBay's) and it became the third largest
U.S. Web company after Google and Amazon.
Traffic to
Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than
Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.
In March 2011
it was reported that Facebook removes approximately 20,000 profiles from the
site every day for various infractions, including spam, inappropriate content
and underage use, as part of its efforts to boost cyber security.
In early 2011,
Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park,
California.
Release of
statistics by DoubleClick showed
that Facebook reached one trillion pageviews in the month of June 2011, making
it the most visited website in the world. It should however be noted that
Google and some of its selected websites are not counted in the DoubleClick
rankings. According to the Nielsen Media Research study, released in December
2011, Facebook is the second most accessed website in the US.
In March 2012,
Facebook announced App Center, an online mobile store which sells applications
that connect to Facebook. The store will be available to iPhone, Android
and mobile web users. In April, Facebook bought the application Instagram for US$1
billion.
In early May of
2012, Facebook acquired social discovery
start-up Glancee.
Facebook, Inc. held an initial public offering on May 17,
2012, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion,
the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
In April 2012,
Facebook acquired the mobile customer loyalty firm Tagline.
In May 2012,
the company settled a class action lawsuit regarding the use of member's images
in ads called "sponsored stories" for $10 million.
Facebook bought
facial-recognition technology company Face.com in June 2012.
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