What Happened to Facebook? The Rise of Facebook
Who would have thought that when Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook back in October 2003 that it would grow into the global juggernaut that is Facebook with over 2 billion active users? The story of how a social network created in a Harvard dorm room went on to be one of, if not the defining company of its generation is a fascinating one and one that needs to be looked into more closely. Facemash was actually written to list pictures of students of the students in Harvard in a ‘Hot or Not’ format and students would compare photos of fellow students to judge who was ‘hotter’ as is discussed in detail over at the excellent runrex.com. This obviously didn’t go down well with the Harvard administration and Zuckerberg just about avoided being expelled, although he did get punished. While there were online “face books” in Harvard which were online directories with photos of students to go with some information about them, there wasn’t one single “face book” that encompassed the whole student fraternity of Harvard. This was what inspired Zuckerberg to come up with a social network that actually did. This article, with the help of the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com, will look to trace the steps of how Facebook came to be and its rise to global juggernaut.
Zuckerberg’s actually majored in psychology when he was in Harvard, although he did take a lot of computer science classes too. The choice of going with psychology may have been strange back then, but given how addictive Facebook is, maybe the choice to major in psychology was a masterstroke by him. The first iteration of Facebook, thefacebook.com, was launched on February of 2004, with co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin as covered over at runrex.com. “Thefacebook” as it was known, was a platform with a profile where one could upload a photo, share their interests and connect with other people as well as offering a network visualization of your connections. It was first only available to people with a Harvard email address. It took off pretty quickly and within the first month, about a half of Harvard’s student population had signed up. However, it was not all plain sailing as fellow students, Cameron Winklevoss, Divya Narendra and Tyler Winklevoss, were suing him. They claimed that Zuckerberg had stolen their concepts and ideas when they were working on a similar project and wanted to be compensated for the same. This case was eventually settled in 2008 when each of them received some 1.2 million shares of Facebook.
Thefacebook was extremely popular and it grew so much that by the end of 2004, it was open to nearly every university in the US and Canada. This was partly fueled by a cash injection of about $500,000 that Zuckerberg had received early on in June of 2004 by Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal as discussed in detail over at runrex.com. Thefacebook received even more money in May of 2005 when Accel put in $12.7m while the venture capitalist Jim Breyer put in $1m. Later that year in August, the company officially dropped the ‘the’ and became Facebook. A month later, Facebook begun to admit high school students as well as employees of Apple and Microsoft, which signaled the company’s first move beyond its initial student base. Zuckerberg had initially taken the semester off from Harvard to focus on the new budding company, but in November of 2005, he made the decision to quit Harvard altogether, although he still went back to hire some new employees from the college. This signaled his move from programmer to CEO of Facebook, as per the gurus over at guttulus.com.
With Zuckerberg finally installed as CEO, Facebook continued full steam ahead with its expansion plans, bringing in universities from New Zealand and Australia as well as high schools from Mexico, Ireland and the UK in December of 2005, bringing the number of colleges that were on Facebook to 2,500, with the number of high schools rising to 25,000 as per the figures over at runrex.com. Another milestone was to come in September of 2007 when Facebook became available to anyone above the age of 13 who had a valid email address. With this, Facebook had gone global and by December of 2006, it had about 12m users, which grew exponentially to about 50m by October of 2007, a timeframe of less than a year. Facebook also pivoted towards business for the first time in May of 2007 by opening their first marketplace that allowed users to post classifieds and sell products and services as per the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com. In April of 2008, another big milestone for Facebook as Facebook Chat was launched, allowing users to connect and chat more instantly with friends and family. Other features that were launched that year include “People You May Know”, “Facebook Connect” and “Facebook Wall”. Facebook now had about 100m users by August of 2008, a figure that tripled to about 300m users by September 2009. A major milestone was then ticked off in December of 2009 when Facebook finally became the most popular social platform in the world with some 350m registered users and 132m unique monthly users. 2010 saw even more improvements on Facebook as users were now able to like comments among others and by the time November 2010 came around, Facebook was valued at about $41bn and it was the 3rd largest web company, behind only Google and Amazon. Remember, all this progress was achieved in under 5 years which makes the rise of Facebook wondrous.
2012 was yet another big year for Facebook as in April of that year, it acquired Instagram for $1bn, which gives an idea of the resources it now had. Later that year, another big milestone came in the form of the company’s IPO as discussed over at guttulus.com. The company was valued at$104bn, and the IPO raised a staggering $161m. Though the IPO was anything but smooth, with a number of lawsuits emanating from it, the rise of Facebook continued when it joined the Fortune 500, at number 462, in 2013. In 2014, 10 years after its launch, Facebook announced that they were acquiring WhatsApp for $19bn, staggering numbers to say the least. The company has continued to go from strength to strength despite challenges, even becoming a major player in ecommerce and online marketing, as per the subject matter experts over at runrex.com, with the rise of Facebook being already the stuff of legend.