20 Years Ago, 19-Year-Old Mark Zuckerberg Created TheFacebook, and So It All Began…
Twenty years ago, a 19-year-old boy named Mark Zuckerberg, standing in his college dorm room, launched the website thefacebook.com (“TheFacebook”) with his roommates for the first time.
Today, 20 years later, the social network created at Harvard by the then-unknown Mark is a dominant company that has grown into a technology giant whose owner’s net worth is over $160 billion.
The name Facebook was inspired by a student handbook that was distributed at universities at the start of the 2004 academic year, known as the “face book”.
The social network, created at Harvard, is taking over not only college campuses, but the entire world.
The Beginning
The idea for Facebook came out of one of Zuckerberg’s previous projects called Facemash, a website that rates the faces of Harvard undergraduate women.
In order to get the photos used on the site, Zuckerberg logged into the university’s security system and copied the photos from the students’ books without permission. This forced the university to shut down the platform within days of its launch and led to disciplinary action against Zuckerberg.
However, just a few months later, Zuckerberg and his roommates launched a new networking site that allows Harvard students to connect with their fellow students using their “.edu” email address.
The social network became a real hit and in a short time managed to gain popularity on other US university campuses.
Within a year, the platform reached one million users, and in August 2005 it was renamed “facebook.com”.
Millions of users in just a few years
By the end of 2006, anyone over the age of 13 who has access to the Internet can join. The number of users jumped from 12 million in 2006 to 50 million in 2007, doubling to 100 million by the end of 2008.
In 2012, Facebook reached one billion users and the company was valued at $104 billion. It was then that Facebook made its initial public offering (IPO) at $38 per share, raising $16 billion. Since that point, the platform’s market share has grown nearly 12-fold to about $474 at Friday’s close.
On Oct. 29, 2021. Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, among other products and services.
Who uses Facebook the most?
According to Datareportal, an online reference library, among global Facebook users, those aged 65 and older (5.6%) outnumber those aged 13-17 (4.8%).
The largest group of Facebook users, at just under a third (29.9%) of all users, is aged 25-34.
Today, Facebook has more than 3 billion users.
