Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, was founded more than 18 years ago today. Founded on February 4, 2004, Facebook is the world’s most used social network.
Facebook, which started from a room, now has millions of daily users. Facebook, which started from the same room, today has Mark Zuckerberg in the top position of billionaires. Currently, Zuckerberg’s net worth is 114.4 billion US dollars.
Zuckerberg, who started Facebook, loved coding, but he was studying psychology at Harvard. Having studied psychology, it became easy for Zuckerberg to design Facebook.
Today, Facebook is used in most countries of the world. Facebook has changed the traditional way of communication.
How did Facebook, which started in a room 18 years ago, become the world’s most popular social network today? On the occasion of the 18th anniversary of Facebook, we are giving information today.
How did Facebook start?
On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, along with his college friends Eduardo Severin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, started Facebook from their Harvard dorm, which was named ‘The Facebook’.
Mark Zuckerberg was 19 years old when he started Facebook. But Facebook was not the first social site created by Mark Zuckerberg. Before that he created other sites, one of which is Facemash.
Mark Zuckerberg was studying psychology at Harvard University when he started Facebook. But he also took many computer science classes. The Facebook name was taken from the seats distributed to Harvard’s new profiling students and staff.
More than 1,200 Harvard students signed up within 24 hours of the Facebook site’s launch. The popularity of Facebook increased so much that in June 2004, more than 250,000 students created accounts. By the end of 2004, Facebook had one million active users.
In 2004, Napster and angel investor Sean Parker became the company’s chairman, and in 2005 it was renamed Facebook from The Facebook.
The Facebook dotcom domain was bought for 200,000 US dollars. After that, Facebook was opened to high school students along with employees of Apple and Microsoft.
In October 2005, Facebook added the Photos feature to its site and expanded to the US and Canada. By the end of 2005, Facebook had reached six million users.
In 2005, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook. Facebook then raised $12.7 million from Excel and $1 million from Jim Breyer.
In November 2005, Zuckerberg quit his studies to focus entirely on the company as a CEO instead of a programmer.
Facebook launched the mobile optimized site m.facebook.com in 2006. After September 2006, there was a big change in Facebook. After that, anyone over 13 years of age could use Facebook to use email.
With this, Facebook came out of the confines of high schools, colleges, universities or businesses. By the end of 2006, Facebook had reached 12 million users. In September 2006, Facebook added a new feature called ‘News Feed’.
1 billion offer to sell Facebook
When the popularity of Facebook increased, there was an offer to sell Facebook. The proposal was made by Yahoo.
In July 2006, Yahoo approached to buy Facebook for 1 billion US dollars. At that time, Facebook had 80-90 million users, from which the income was 300 million dollars.
Facebook founder Zuckerberg
After the purchase proposal came, a meeting was held with Facebook’s 3 board members, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Jim Baer. In that meeting, Zuckerberg said that this meeting was only formal and that Facebook would not be sold.
In that meeting, Peter said, ‘We should probably talk about this. 1 billion dollars is a lot of money. You own 25 percent. There are many things you can do with money.’
But Zuckerberg did not sell Facebook. Since Facebook was not sold to Yahoo and was open to everyone, it attracted many users. By the end of 2007, Facebook’s monthly active users had reached 58 million.
Facebook bought Paraki in 2007. Paraki was founded by the co-creators of Firefox. It was developing a web-based operating system, which was later used by Facebook to create and power mobile sites. In 2007, Facebook launched a marketplace to buy and sell products.
Facebook also launched a standalone Facebook for iPhone app in July 2008. The Facebook chat feature was also launched that year. But in 2009, Facebook changed it to the ‘Like’ button, which changed the way social media was used. Facebook launched Facebook Timeline in 2011.
Launch of the Messenger app
Messenger app used by millions of people every day was released by Facebook in 2011. Messenger was released for iOS and Android and was the only major revenue stream. The instant messaging app had the facility to send messages, photos and videos using the internet.
In 2012, Facebook bought the photo sharing app Instagram for $1 billion. Which was Facebook’s biggest purchase. Instagram received 1 billion in cash and stock.
Facebook’s IPO
Facebook issued an IPO in May 2012. The IPO was issued 1 month after purchasing Instagram.
2 days before the IPO, Facebook announced that it would sell 25 percent more shares than planned due to high demand. Facebook raised $16 billion from the IPO.
This IPO is considered as one of the largest IPOs. At that time, the price per share of Facebook was 38 dollars. Today, Facebook’s price per share is $273.
1 month after the IPO, Facebook’s monthly users reached 1 billion. This means that 1 out of 7 people on earth was using Facebook. After that, Facebook added trending, group, and nearby friend features.
In February 2014, Facebook announced the purchase of WhatsApp for $16 billion. It was later increased to 19 billion dollars.
But in fact, Facebook bought WhatsApp for 22 billion dollars. Because a part of the payment was Facebook shares. By the time the deal was closed, the share price had risen from $68 to $77.
Along with Instagram, Paraki, WhatsApp, Facebook also bought Oculus, Chainspace and other companies.
Facebook name change
In 2021, Facebook changed the name of Facebook Inc. to Meta. Facebook changed its name to focus on the Metaverse project. With the name change, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc. are currently running under Meta.
fewer users
Facebook users have decreased for the first time in the history of Facebook. According to the report of the fourth quarter of 2021 released by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, 1 million users have decreased in 3 months.
In the third quarter of 2021, there were 1.93 billion daily active users, but by the fourth quarter, Facebook’s daily active users have dropped to 1.92 billion.
Facebook lost $230 billion in a single day after reports of declining users. In which Zuckerberg alone has lost more than 30 billion dollars.
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