Face Book: Insights: Navigating Social Media Platform

Facebook is a social networking website that was founded in February 2004 by Harvard University students Chris Hughes, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg. The idea behind Facebook was to provide an online book of faces for university students to connect and share information.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook, Inc. He was born on May 14, 1984, in White Plains, New York, USA.

Zuckerberg’s interest in computers and programming began at a young age.

He created a chat service for his family — and for his dad’s dental business — when he was a pre-teen growing up in New York City.

Zuckerberg explained on a recent podcast “The dentists and hygienists needs to share data on the patients. So I build a system where he could communicate with folks across rooms, and also communicate with me and my sisters upstairs- and I called is ZuckNet”. Courtesy by : voz.com

As a side projects since he was in middle school, he developed a Basic messaging system called “Synapse” that allowed computers in his home to communicate with each other.

“As students at Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg and friend Adam D’Angelo created an MP3 player that would keep track of every song the user played on a computer and, as it learned what the user liked, would begin to make playlists,” the Harvard Crimson wrote in 2003.

Before Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg built a chat network called “ZuckNet”.

He was dethroned by AOL (America Online is the name of a popular online service. It is often abbreviated as AOL. The company was founded in 1985 and is considered an early Internet pioneer, providing many Internet services in the 1990’s including dial-up Internet access), but Zuckerberg has been building products longer than we thought.

Zuckerberg on his notorious beginnings:

FACEMASH

FaceMash was a prank website that he launched in college, in his dorm room, before he started Facebook. The short-lived FaceMash website began with a love scorned Zuckererg in 2003.

Put up two pictures of two women and decided which one was the better more attractive of the two, by fellow students could vote on their attractiveness using an algorithm that ranked the selections.

Connect U

ConnectU (Originally Harvard Connection) was a social networking website launched on may 21, 2004, that was founded by Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra in December 2002.

Thefacebook

February, 2004, “Thefacebook” launched initially this was only opened to people with a Harvard email address and within the first month 50% of the college’s students had signed up.

Zuckerberg ad previously worked on a similar project with fellow students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra. He eventually quit to do this one thing, Thefacebook. But this ex-collaborators say he stole their concept and ideas and they wanted recompense.

They eventually came to a settlement in 2008, with each of the trio receiving 1.2m shares in the Facebook company. By the IPO, these were worth $300m, but more on the IPO later.

Thefacebook was an instant hit and interest grew and grew and grew. By the end of 2004, membership was open to nearly all universities in the US and Canada and people were clamouring to sign up.

June of that year also saw Zuckerberg move the company’s operations to Palo Alto, California and secured some important investment. Co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, joined the board and brought with him $500,000.

Facebook

In August the ‘the’ was dropped and the company officially became Facebook (the facebook.com domain cost $200,000). The following month high school students are admitted, along with employees of Microsoft and Apple. The company was now ready to move beyond its student base.

Then in November Zuckerberg took an important decisions about his own life. Having taken the semester off from Harvard, he announced he was leaving entirely, returning briefly to hire some new employees. After significant investment and a growing membership, Zuckerberg was ready to fully dedicate himself to running his company, as a CEO rather than a programmer.

With the Zuck at the helm full-time, Facebook continued its expansion plans. In December Australian and New Zealand universities were included, along with high schools from Mexico, the UK, and Ireland. That meant there were now 2,500 colleges and 25,000 high schools with access to Facebook.

It wasn’t until September 2006 when the platform became open for everyone (well, anyone over 13 with a valid email address). Facebook had now gone fully global. We also started to see the rate of membership growth:

December 2006: 12m

April 2007: 20m

July 2007: 30m

October 2007: 50m

In May 2007, Facebook open their Marketplace, which lets users post classifieds to sell products and services. It also saw the launch of the Facebook Application Developer platform, opening the gates for developers to create their own applications and games that integrated with Facebook.

The platform was also looking beyond personal profiles to how businesses could use the site. By the end of 2007 over 100,000 companies had signed up, with Facebook launching Pages for Businesses to support this. Already they’re making plans to build on existing ad revenue to make advertising on the platform accessible to even the smallest of businesses.

Then in 2008 we see a huge release from Facebook. April, 2008 saw Facebook Chat roll out, allow us to more instantly annoy our friends and family. Essentially, the concept is no different to ZuckNet. We also see the People You May Know, Facebook Wall, and Facebook Connect released in the same year.

Meanwhile the user count continues to grow:

August, 2008: 100m

January, 2009: 150m

February 2009: 175m

April, 2009: 200m

July, 2009: 250m

September, 2009: 300m

We also saw one of the big Facebook games appear. Farmville was released in June, 2009 and, despite being a rip off of a game called Farm Town, became a huge success. By August it had 10m daily active users.