Facebook:
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 facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each
other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".
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 Web site, 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
Web site 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 Web site. 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.
|
|||
Date
|
Users
(in millions) |
Days later
|
|
August 26, 2008
|
1,665
|
178.38%
|
|
April 8, 2009
|
225
|
13.33%
|
|
September 15, 2009
|
160
|
9.38%
|
|
February 5, 2010
|
143
|
6.99%
|
|
July 21, 2010
|
166
|
4.52%
|
|
January 5, 2011
|
168
|
3.57%
|
|
May 30, 2011
|
145
|
3.45%
|
|
September 22, 2011
|
115
|
3.73%
|
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. Facebook has been identified as a
possible candidate for anIPO by
2013. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Facebook is looking to
raise as much as $10 billion in its IPO and that it plans to file paperwork as
early as February 3.[49][50][51]
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 Web site in the
world.[56] It should however be noted that Google and
some of its selected Web sites 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.
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