Facebook Founded: Zuckerberg Launches Global Connection

Mark Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook" from his Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004, and within twenty-four hours, between 1,200 and 1,500 Harvard students had registered. The site was simple: upload a photo, list your classes, and browse profiles of other students at your university. There was no news feed, no advertising, no algorithmic content curation. It was a digital directory with a social layer, and it spread through college campuses like a chain letter. Zuckerberg, a nineteen-year-old sophomore studying computer science and psychology, had already drawn attention and controversy at Harvard. Months earlier, he had built Facemash, a site that placed students’ photos side by side and asked users to vote on who was more attractive. Harvard’s administration shut it down and charged Zuckerberg with breaching security and violating privacy. Three upperclassmen, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, had also hired Zuckerberg to help build a similar social network called HarvardConnection. They later sued, claiming he stole their idea, and settled for $65 million. Thefacebook expanded to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale within its first month, then to all Ivy League schools, then to most universities in the United States and Canada. The site required a valid .edu email address to register, a restriction that created exclusivity and drove demand. By December 2004, it had one million users. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel invested $500,000 for a 10.2 percent stake in the company that summer, a bet that would eventually be worth over a billion dollars. The .edu requirement was dropped in 2006, opening Facebook to anyone over thirteen. The News Feed launched the same year, fundamentally changing how people consumed information. By 2012, Facebook had one billion users. The platform that began as a college directory became one of the most powerful communication networks in human history, reshaping elections, commerce, journalism, and the basic mechanics of how humans maintain relationships.