FaceBook

Facebook History & Trivia

Facebook is a well-known social networking website headquartered in the Stanford Research Park, Palo Alto, California. This free-used website is solely operated and owned by Facebook, Inc.

Facebook History & Founder: Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook History

On February 4, in the year 2004, Facebook was launched.Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and was formerly sited atthefacebook.com while attending the Harvard University as sophomore student in Psychology. The membership was at first restricted to the students of the Harvard College. Within the very first month, over half of the undergraduate students in that college registered on the facebook. After few months Zuckerberg, together with Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes, two of his Harvard friends who, dropped out of Harvard and moved to Palo Alto, California to run the website as their sole occupation.

Facebook has over more than 700 million monthly users. It is mainly well-known for uploading photos, around 14 million daily.

Brand Name Origin: He called it TheFacebook.com obtaining the idea from the Harvard printed publication of students’ profiles and photos given to students at the beginning of each academic year.

Acquisitions: Parakey, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents, ShareGrov, Nextstop, Chai Labs,  Hot Potato, Drop.io, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu, DayTum, Sofa

Facebook History & Trivia

-In 2005 the “The” was dropped and the domain Facebook.com was purchased for US$200K – this is believed to be the biggest decision made by an outsider in the Facebook History.

-The legal case against Facebook dating back to September 2004, when Divya Narendra, and the brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who founded the social-networking site ConnectU, accused Mr. Zuckerberg of copying their ideas and coding. Mr. Zuckerberg had worked as a computer programmer for them when they were all at Harvard before Facebook was created. The case was dismissed due to a technicality in March 2007 but without a ruling.

-Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003.The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not, and according to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash “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”

-Facebook has investors including PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, and Greylock Partners. In 2007 Microsoft jumped in and invested $246 million for a 1.6% share in Facebook. The next month Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing made a large investment too. Yahoo! and Google both offered to buy Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook’s not for sale.

-On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced it had acquired FB.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation for an undisclosed amount. On January 11, 2011, the Farm Bureau disclosed $8.5 million in “domain sales income”, making the acquisition of FB.com one of the ten highest domain sales in history.

-According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites is currently 2nd.  The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 50 billion uploaded cumulatively.

-By 2005, the use of Facebook had already become so ubiquitous that the generic verb “facebooking” had come into use to describe the process of browsing others’ profiles or updating one’s own. In 2008, Collins English Dictionary declared “Facebook” as its new Word of the Year. In December 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared its word of the year to be the verb “unfriend”

- The movie ‘Social Network’ describes the complete Facebook History and its growth from the Harvard dorms.