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The Facebook
Facebook was founded in 2004 originally called "The Facebook" and was developed so that Harvard students could use their school email accounts as a way to connect with other students. Mark Zuckerberg saw this as an opportunity to help bring the social life of college out into the mainstream for other college students to connect with each other. -
Coding begins
In January of 2004 Zuckerberg began writing the code for what would eventually become the social media giant. His inspiration came from an editorial written on facebook's current forerunner called "FaceMash". "FaceMash" was considered controversial at the time due to the sole purpose of the site being to rate each other's attractiveness based on uploaded photos of college students. -
Trouble early on
During the early days of "FaceMash" the social media platform garnered much unwanted attention from Harvard due to the site violating school policy. This led to the platform being shutdown by the university within days. Zuckerberg was neraly expelled due to this social media platform violating students privacy and copying student ID images which were used to access the dormitories. -
Learning from mistakes
This was a close called for Zuckerberg but a very useful one. Now that he had a better plan on how to connect college students together all he needed was a catchy name. Sheets of paper were distributed throughout the freshman class along with the staff eventually gave Zuckerberg the idea of calling his new site Facebook. Which soon spread to other college campuses launching under the URL thefacebook.com -
Accidental success
Mark Zuckerberg has stated in numerous interviews that "he was never trying to start a multi-million dollar company, he was trying to solve a problem that was all around him". He seen connecting people as a basic need that no other platform provided. -
Birth of Facebook.com
thefacebook.com changed its URL after the address was purchased for 200,000$ in August of 2005. US high school students could sign up during September of that year and then Facebook began to spread worldwide. -
References
-McFadden, C. (2023, March 29). A Brief History of Facebook and Its Major Milestones. https://interestingengineering.com/culture/history-of-facebook
-Hall, M. (2024, February 5). Facebook. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook