History of Facebook

 Facebook, American company offering online social networking services. Facebook was 

founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all 

of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in 

the world, with more than one billion users as of 2012, and about half that number were using 

Facebook every day. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.

Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from 

advertisements on the Web site. New users can create profiles, upload photos, join a pre-

existing group, and start new groups. The site has many components, including Timeline, a 

space on each user’s profile page where users can post their content and friends can post 

messages; Status, which enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and 

News Feed, which informs users of changes to their friends’ profiles and status. Users can chat 

with each other and send each other private messages. Users can signal their approval of 

content on Facebook with the Like button, a feature that also appears on many other Web 

sites.

The company has a complicated early history. It began at Harvard University in 2003 as 

Facemash, an online service for students to judge the attractiveness of their fellow students. 

Because the primary developer, Zuckerberg, violated university policy in acquiring resources for 

the service, it was shut down after two days. Despite its mayfly like existence, 450 people (who 

voted 22,000 times) flocked to Facemash. That success prompted Zuckerberg to register the 

URL http://www.thefacebook.com in January 2004. He then created a new social network at 

that address with fellow students Saverin, Moskovitz, and Hughes.

The social network TheFacebook.com launched in February 2004. Harvard students who signed 

up for the service could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their 

lives, such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Its popularity increased, and 

soon students from other prestigious schools, such as Yale and Stanford universities, were 

allowed to join. By June 2004 more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had signed up, and 

that same year major corporations such as the credit-card company MasterCard started paying 

for exposure on the site. 

Facebook has become a powerful tool for political movements, beginning with the U.S. 

presidential election of 2008, when more than 1,000 Facebook groups were formed in support 

of either Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate John McCain. In 

Colombia the service was used to rally hundreds of thousands in protests against the anti-

government FARC guerrilla rebellion. In Egypt, activists protesting the government of Pres. 

Hosni Mubarak during the uprising of 2011 often organized themselves by forming groups on 

Facebook.