Facebook is the largest online social networking site in the whole planet, now crossing the mark of having 1.000 million users worldwide. Its name comes from the colloquial name given to the book that students get at the start of a new academic year in some universities in the U.S.
Mark Zuckerberg, together with his college roommates at the Harvard University (Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes) created Facebook back in February 2004, of course not having any idea of the marvelous growth it has had in the world today. Facebook is a $100 billion value creation that is now freely and easily available to anyone and especially to any business as well.
My intention here is not to bore you with history and all that, so here you have the principle history aspects that you really need to know about Facebook and why it is such a great vehicle to use to scale your business to a complete new level of social interaction with your existing and potential customers and clients.
Important Facebook Events:
- The predecessor of Facebook back in 2003 was called Facemash
- Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo views in its first four hours online
- Facemash was not a success because of Legal problems, that’s how Facebook was created in 2004
- At the beginning, its online address was thefacebook.com
- Facebook was a website initially limited to Harvard students, and later was expanded to other colleges.
- Facebook continued its expansion by giving access to high school students in 2005. In that same year, Facebook decided to register a new domain name called facebook.com, which was worth $200.000
- Accel partners invested more than $12 million in Facebook back in 2005; Jim Breyer invested $1 million as well.
- On 2006, Facebook decided to allow anyone 13 years or older to create an account.
- On October 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for advertising, rising Facebook’s implied value up to $15 billion.
- On January 2008, Facebook was ranked as the most used social networking service.
- In November 2010, Facebook’s value reached the $40 billion mark, surpassing eBay and becoming the third largest U.S. Web company.
- More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010
- In March 2011, striving to boost cyber security, Facebook decided to remove 20,000 profiles every single day for various infractions like spam, inappropriate content and underage use.
- Facebook started trading on the NASDAQ on May 2012, in that same year Facebook announced App Center, an online mobile store which sells applications that connect to Facebook.
In 2013, Facebook announced Graph Search, which provides users with a precise answer rather than a link to an answer.
