-
2004 - Welcome to The Facebook
Zuckerberg developed a social platform based off the simple concept of "networking", he called it the Facebook (Vargas, 2010). The website became such a hit that he decided it'd be easier to run without the tolls of college, so he dropped out of Harvard and began releasing the site to more college students in other campuses. After release, Zuckerberg was faced with a lawsuit due to the collaboration on a previous site with Harvard colleagues (Boyd, 2018). -
2005 - drop the "the" Facebook, you're making it big now.
The Facebook began expansion to new colleges and schools, on Facebook you were able to see your own profile and search for people. Facebook upgraded and had an option to select what you were "looking for" on The Facebook, allowing people to respond with "friendship", "relationship" or even "random play". Zuckerberg received investments from some big brands including PayPal, then in May of 2005 received almost double of PayPal's investments from companies including Accel (Boyd, 2018). -
2006 - Touch Up's, introducing the Mini Feed & global
In 2006 Facebook got a makeover with the brand new "Mini Feed" and "the Poke". Mini Feed allowed people to keep track of other's notices, relationship statuses and profile updates, the poke allowed you to interact without speech by just notifying the person that you "poked" them. By December 2006, 12 million people were using Facebook, anyone could sign up over the age of 13 with a valid email address (Boyd, 2018). -
2008 - The Marketplace on Facebook
The Marketplace on Facebook allowed users to post about products or services that they could sell, allowing people to expand their own business ideas or products (Boyd, 2018). Early 2008 saw the Facebook Chat emerge allowing users to private chat back and forth on Facebook, not long after we saw "People you may know" allowing other people's friends to be displayed on user's feed to find more connections between people (Boyd, 2018). -
2009 - Farmville
With the Facebook user population reaching up to 200 million Zuckerberg decided to launch a game through Facebook called Farmville, it was a very simple game, however it reached 10 million daily active users (Boyd, 2018). -
2009 - Facebook on Mobile Phones
Facebook hit a milestone, launching the Facebook app through smartphone application stores, allowing free download (Mullins, 2016). User rates increased up to 350 million users, the next few years saw Facebook introduce real time news feed, similar to Twitter, it allowed constant refresh notifications and updates and allowed others to mention their friends in comments, make their own comment or share the news feed post on their personal feed (Mullins, 2016 ; Boyd, 2018). -
2010 - One expensive website
Facebook was valued at $41 billion and became the third largest web company in the United States, just behind Google and Amazon (Boyd, 2018). -
2011- Milestone after Milestone
Facebook finally became one of the most viewed sites, reaching one trillion views online, the website underwent renovations allowing for profiles to add their own "cover photo" and the introduction to a new Facebook linked app centered around Facebook messaging on smartphones (Boyd, 2018). -
2012 - Publicity is key, to success or failure…
In 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, an upcoming smartphone application that revamped social media through the posting of photos (Boyd, 2018). Zuckerberg took Facebook public, with a company value of $104 billion, after technical issues Facebooks stocks began to plummet leading to lawsuits claiming underwriters of Facebook were cashing out (Boyd, 2018). Facebook's first public challenge did not fail them and was still one of the leading media platforms and carrying on with billions of users. -
2014 - Expanding the Facebook Brand
Facebook decided to run the social media through mobile phones, after buying Instagram, Whatsapp and Oculus VR, a virtual reality headset that would be the newest face for digital media platforms (Boyd, 2018). Messenger then became its own separate application that at first annoyed users, however no changes were made, and users simply downloaded the application allowing Facebooks market to grow even further due to applications it now had on the market (Boyd, 2018).
