The story of Facebook

Facebook is one of the biggest web sites and the most famous social network on the web, visited by more than 400 million people a month. Nevertheless, only a few of them know its true story. Do you ever wonder how Facebook was founded?

Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who was a second year computer science student in Harvard, when he wrote the software for a humorous website named Facemash. The website was as a type of "hot or not" game for Harvard students. He hacked into Harvard's security network and copied the students’ photos to use them in his website.

Facemash opened on October 28, 2003 and closed a few days later because Mark Zuckerberg faced charges of breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy for stealing the photos he used to populate the site.

On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg relaunched with a new website "Thefacebook". Membership to the website was at first restricted to Harvard College students. Zuckerberg enlisted a few of his fellow students to help grow the website: Eduardo Saverin worked on business, Dustin Moskovitz as a programmer, Andrew McCollum as a graphic artist, and Chris Hughes. Together the team expanded the site to additional universities and colleges.

In 2004, an angel investor, Sean Parker (founder of Napster) became the first company's president. The company changed the name from TheFacebook to just Facebook after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid email address.

On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.

In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.

In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares of privately held companies, Facebook's value was $41 billion (surpassing eBay's slightly).

That was the interesting story of Facebook and the way that Mark Zuckerberg became the world’s youngest billionaire! In my opinion, Facebook has not reached the top of the ladder of its success yet. It will have an even more bright future the next years…