HISTORY OF FACEBOOK

           It all began in February 2004 when a young Harvard Psychology student, by the name of Mark Zuckerberg, decided to create a way for other Harvard students to get to know each other and keep in touch over the internet.

He called it TheFacebook.com obtaining the idea from the Harvard printed publication of students’ profiles and photos given to students at the beginning of each academic year. Access to the website was firstly restricted to Harvard students and then, given its increasing popularity, it was extended soon after to other colleges like Yale, Stanford and Columbia.

Facebook Becomes Popular

After few months Zuckerberg, together with Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes, two of his Harvard friends who helped him to build Facebook, dropped out of Harvard and moved to Palo Alto, California to run the website as their sole occupation. In June 2004, after a coincidental meeting with the former co-creator of Napster, Sean Parker, Facebook received its first investment of US$500K from the co-founder of Pay-Pal, Peter Thiel.

In 2005 Facebook granted access to members belonging to recognized academic institutions and other organisations in USA, Canada and other English-speaking countries as long as they could provide a valid email I.D. associated with their institutions. In the same year the "The" was dropped and the domain Facebook.com was purchased for US$200K. Two equity and venture capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners invested respectively US$ 12.7mil and US$27.5mil.

According to an internal survey completed in September 2005 more than 85% of students of the enlisted universities had a Facebook account and at least 50% of them were accessing the website daily. In the following months there were few attempts to purchase Facebook - in September 2006 Mark Zuckerberg refused an offer from the internet giant Yahoo with prices close to the US$1 billion dollar mark.

Facebook Goes Global

Determined not to sell Facebook in order to maintain its independence, Zuckerberg launched his ever popular social network on a global scale granting the access to basically everyone who owned a simple valid e-mail address. At this stage Facebook faced strong competition from another social network site called MySpace bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in 2005 for US$580mil.

Exactly a year later Facebook Inc. was approached by Microsoft which, subsequently, acquired a 1.6% shares of the company for the staggering sum of US$240mil boosting the implied total value of the social network to US15 Billion. A month later an Hong Kong billionaire invested in Facebook US$60mil.

Despite the large sums invested in the company Facebook declared to have turned cash flow positive only towards the end of 2009. Facebook's headquarters can be found in Palo Alto California, Dublin, Ireland and Seoul, South Korea with rumors of a new one soon to be built in Hyderabad, India.

Facebook: The Website and its Features

The main aim of Facebook is to allow its users to freely create profiles, upload photos, list interests, contacts and other personal information which can be shared consequently with a number of friends. Members can communicate with each other in different ways using tools such as private or public messaging or a chat.

Facebook offers a number of privacy settings which can be enabled or disabled according to users’ desire of limiting the exposure of their profile to others. Other features include a “Wall” a virtual space where friends can post messages, upload videos and photos for everyone to see, a “Status” whereby users can let others know of their thoughts and whereabouts and a “Photo Album” where an unlimited amount of photos can be uploaded daily.

Users can also play games, send virtual gifts and post classified ads. In 2006 a News Feed was added on users' homepage informing them, in real time, of profile changes and events such as birthdays of the users' friends.

Mark Zuckerberg himself owns a facebook page and in his list of interests, in his personal info he writes - “I make things that increase information flow between people.”