The Facebook history

Here is the short history of Facebook, the biggest social networking site from the planet. What begins as an online place for college students to know each other has been transformed into a global online phenomenon.

Facebook, or TheFaceBook as it was called at the beginning was launched in 4th of February, 2004.

Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University student started the site as a way for his fellow students from Harvard to get to know each other. At that time, the site was opened only for certain students and it wasn’t perceived as a business even it has funds at disposal. Mark saw this website as an alternative to spend more wisely the time after school. Mark was still in the school when the site started to grow at an incredible rate. As to discuss the initial funders, they received money from individuals like Peter Theil, Accel Partners, Greylock partners and from the advertising deals with Microsoft and iTunes.

The students which were members started to recommend Facebook to other students and the fellows from other universities started to have possibility to join the site. Until 2006, Facebook was not open to the public.

After the site was live for a period, Mark brought for helping to grow the site Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. A fem months later, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped Harvard to concentrate on growing Facebook. Facebook, as we know it today was started in August 2005 when the company bought the domain Facebook.com with 200,000 USD from a company called About Face.

In 2006 we find Facebook facing a tremendous growth. Many more school, universities and businesses started to be part of the network. Starting with September 2006, anyone above 13 years old is eligible to have an account on Facebook. Being part of na network wasn’t a requirement anymore.

In March 2006 there were rumours about a potential acquisition of Facebook by Google. They made an offer for 750 million USD but the Facebook management dropped it because they thought of 2 billion USD.

Microsoft was also on the short list of potential acquisitors, but in the end they just bought 1,5% from shares and started a huge advertising contract with Facebook.

When things started to look tremendous, ConnectU, another Harvard based social networking site claimed that the founder of Facebook stole some of the codes from their software. In the end, the lawsuit was dropped and Facebook started to move forward.

The idea of community was at the base right from the beginning and it is also now, even if the
site is much, much bigger. All players, the developers, personal users and business users understood how important is to keep the spirit of community alive both for Facebook success and their own.

The Facebook team is very interested to make their community happy and that’s why they add new features all the time and if they identify new needs from customers, to fulfill them.This web 2.0 site is a great resource for your social media marketing efforts so include it in your marketing weapons.