Facebook Launched

On Monday, 9 February 2004, The Harvard Crimson ran a short news story headlined "Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website". A sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg, it reported, had grown impatient waiting for the university to build an official online "face book" of students, and after about a week of coding had launched thefacebook.com "last Wednesday afternoon"—4 February. By the Sunday afternoon more than 650 students had signed up, and he expected 900 by the next morning.

The domain itself had been registered on 11 January 2004, according to the .com registry.

A Harvard Directory, Rebuilt by a Student

The word "facebook" did not mean a company in 2004. At Harvard it meant the directory of student photos kept by each residential House, several of them password-protected. The Crimson's report makes clear that a campus-wide online version was something students had been asking for and the university was slow to provide. Zuckerberg put it bluntly to the paper: he thought it was "kind of silly" that it would take the University a couple of years, and that he could "do it better than they can".

The site required a Harvard e-mail address. Members uploaded a photo and personal and academic details, could search for others by course, organisation and House, and could build a network of friends. Zuckerberg told the Crimson that Friendster had been a model, and that the feature he considered most novel was the ability to look up who else was in your classes. The university's director of residential computing told the paper that an official version was a "very high priority" and should be ready by the end of the spring semester.

Zuckerberg did not build the company alone. Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes are listed with him as co-founders.

From One Campus to Everyone

Facebook's expansion was deliberately gradual. Each step widened the set of e-mail domains that could register:

The company's 26 September 2006 announcement explained the reasoning in Zuckerberg's words: it was expanding "to respond to the requests of millions of people who want to be part of Facebook", and about a third of its college users had already graduated. Even then, the network structure that had defined the Harvard site remained: profiles were visible only to people in the same network and to confirmed friends, and new users were asked to verify a mobile phone number.

Along the way the company moved to Palo Alto in mid-2004, took its first outside investment from Peter Thiel that summer, bought the facebook.com domain in 2005 and dropped "The" from its name.

Overtaking MySpace

Facebook was not the largest social network of the mid-2000s. That was MySpace. The crossover came in 2008 in comScore's worldwide measurements: according to comScore figures reported in August 2008, Facebook passed MySpace in worldwide unique visitors in April, and by June had 132.1 million monthly unique visitors to MySpace's 117.6 million. Facebook's global audience had grown 153 percent in a year; MySpace's had grown 3 percent.

The metric matters. This was unique visitors worldwide, measured by a panel company—not registered users and not active users. Facebook's own count of monthly active users passed one billion later: its third-quarter 2012 report gave 1.01 billion MAUs as of 30 September 2012, with 584 million daily active users on average that September and 604 million mobile MAUs.

Building a Group of Companies

In the 2010s Facebook bought the companies that would later make up most of Meta's portfolio:

• Instagram — acquired in 2012
• WhatsApp — announced 19 February 2014; about US$16 billion in cash and stock, plus $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp's founders and employees. WhatsApp then had over 450 million monthly users
• Oculus VR — announced 25 March 2014; about US$2 billion ($400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares), plus a $300 million earn-out

In October 2021 the parent company, Facebook, Inc., renamed itself Meta Platforms. The social network kept the Facebook name; see Meta.

Criticism

The same design that made Facebook useful—real identities, a dense graph of friends, and a business funded by advertising targeted on that data—made it the subject of persistent criticism from the late 2010s onward. The best-documented case is the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, in which data harvested from Facebook users was used for political targeting. Debates over election interference, misinformation and the company's handling of user data have followed it since.

The Crimson story of February 2004 contains an early version of the question. In it, Zuckerberg told the paper he was not going to sell anybody's e-mail address. The site then was a directory for a single campus; what it would become, and what its business model would require, were not yet in view.