Facebook Was Born 10 Years Ago. Here’s What It Looked Like.
On Feb. 4, 2004, in his Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg launched
thefacebook.com, a website where college students could post information
about themselves, trade messages, and become virtual “friends” with one
another. It was entering an already-crowded field of social networks.
Friendster was the world’s most popular at the time, but it was about to
be overtaken by a one-year-old upstart called MySpace. Google had
launched Orkut just weeks earlier.
Facebook was different because it was only for college students,
featured a clean layout devoid of spam, and had no immediate plans to
make money. It was an instant hit. “I assume I’ll eventually make
something profitable,” Zuckerberg shrugged in a June 2004 interview
with the Harvard student newspaper. (It took him a while, but Facebook
turned its first profit in 2009, and last year it reported a profit of
some $1.5 billion on nearly $8 billion in revenues.)
By December the site had 1 million users, and it hadn’t even added
its photo-upload feature yet. Here’s what thefacebook.com looked like
in 2005, a year after it launched:
Over the years it piled on the features. Some, like News Feed and the like button, changed the Internet forever. Others, like Facebook Gifts, not so much. For its 10th
birthday, Facebook has put together a timeline of significant events in
its own history. It reflects a bit of a selective memory—you won’t find
Gifts, Beacon, or the site’s short-lived experiment with majority rule
on this timeline. But then, that’s part of what made Facebook so
appealing in the first place: the ability to edit your own image to your
liking.
The timeline is one of several features that Facebook released Monday
night, on the eve of its anniversary. On Tuedsay it will unveil a
product called “A Look Back” that lets users make a personal movie or
slideshow of their favorite moments in their lives since they joined
Facebook. The company also launched a slick new iPhone app, Paper, in the App Store on Monday.
Here’s Zuckerberg’s statement on the eve of his brainchild’s 10th birthday:
It's been an incredible journey so far, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it. It's been amazing to see how people have used Facebook to build a real community and help each other in so many ways. In the next decade, we have the opportunity and responsibility to connect everyone and to keep serving the community as best we can.
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