Facebook history timeline

Officially, Facebook was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes. Back then, the site was intended as a social media platform for Harvard students exclusively. However, the story of how it started is a little more complicated than that and has sparked quite a bit of controversy.
It all started in 2003, when Zuckerberg created FaceMash, a platform that allowed users to compare photos of colleagues and decide who was “hotter”. FaceMash was problematic and short-lived, yet surprisingly popular, leading Zuckerberg to see the potential of a campus-wide social network. And so, the next year, he launched the “TheFacebook”, which became an instant hit.
TheProblem? Well, just a week after the launch, Zuckerberg was accused by three Harvard seniors that the idea was stolen from them. This resulted in a lawsuit, which settled in 2008 with the each of the accusers getting 1.2 million shares in the company.

Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to help Harvard students connect with one another. Back then, there weren’t any universal online face books at the university. Sororities and fraternities each had their own individual directories, and there were paper sheets with student and staff profiles distributed to freshmen, but there was no centralized platform. This is what Zuckerberg tried to do with Facebook: gather all that information in one place so that all students at Harvard can learn about each other and communicate with one another.

Facebook was an instant hit. Within the first month after its official launch in February 2004, over half of Harvard’s undergrad students were already registered on the platform. In March that year, the site expanded to Yale, Columbia and Stanford too, and it was gradually adopted by most universities in the US and Canada. In 2005, Facebook opened to high school students too, and in 2006 it was made available to the general public.
By the end of 2005, the platform already had 6 million users, and it continued to grow exponentially over the years. As you can see on the Facebook history timeline, the site reached a whopping 1 billion active users in October 2012.

When launched officially in 2004, the social networking site was originally called “TheFacebook”. The company gave up the “The” from its name after purchasing the facebook.com domain in August 2005, for which it paid $200,000. Now, if you consider FaceMash to be a first version of Facebook (we’re talking about the “Hot or Not” social site that inspired Zuckerberg to build Facebook), you could say “FaceMash” was the original name of the renowned platform.

Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms, Inc.) IPOed in 2012, so it is publicly owned. However, co-founder and chairman Mark Zuckerberg is the largest shareholder, owning 29.3% of the company, as well as the only CEO throughout the history of Facebook. Therefore, Zuckerberg is largely seen as the owner of the enterprise.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s first user was the founder himself, Mark Zuckerberg. He had the first official account ever created on Facebook, with ID #4. Accounts #1 to #3 were tests made by Zuckerberg, which he deleted afterwards. Next after him were co-founders Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. The first non-founder Facebook user was Arie Hasit, a friend of the founders who wasn’t involved in the project as he wasn’t interested in computer science.

Well, it depends who you ask. If you ask Zuckerberg, the answer will be no. But Facebook has had its fair share of scandals and controversies throughout its history, and one of the first is the accusation that Mark Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from ConnectU (originally called HarvardConnection.com), which involved three Harvard seniors who were building a – wait for it – social network for Harvard.
The three students – Divya Narendra and brothers Tyler & Cameron Winklevoss – accused Zuckerberg of pretending to help them build the social network they envisioned, but instead stealing their idea to create Facebook. After a 4-year-long legal battle, Facebook ended up paying each of the three accusers 1.2 million in shares. Since the lawsuit ended in a settlement that involved paying quite a big amount to the accusers, one might draw the conclusion that there may be some legitimacy to the claims.

As you can see on the Facebook history timeline, Facebook (the company, not the app) changed its name to Meta Platforms in October 2021. But why the rename? Well, quite a lot of voices said it happened in an attempt to shake off the scandals the company has had been involved in the last years, including spreading misinformation, data leaks, and others. However, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that Facebook changed its name primarily because the “Meta” name was more closely aligned with what the company was working toward, namely the “metaverse”, an online virtual space that would unify multiple disparate digital worlds.

As of July 2022, Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth is $63 billion according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. The Facebook founder has lost over 50% of his wealth in 2022. Still, he remains one of the richest people in the world, currently ranking 17^th.

It’s estimated that Facebook (Meta Platforms) owns over 90 companies, many of which are hidden to the public, so it would be quite difficult to list them all. However, here are a few of the top companies owned by the social media giant:
· Instagram
· Giphy
· WhatsApp
· Oculus VR
· Onavo
· Tbh
· ConnectU – Yes, you read that right. This is the exact same company that’s known in the history of Facebook as the one that accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for the social networking platform. As a result of the lawsuit settled in 2008, besides other payments Facebook made towards the accusers, it also bought ConnectU as part of the settlement.
· Atlas Solutions
· LiveRail
· RedKix
· CTRL-Labs
· Beluga
· Spool
· FriendFeed

Yes, Facebook does own Instagram, widely abbreviated online as IG. The Facebook history timeline shows that the company acquired IG in 2012. They paid $1 billion for IG, a shocking sum at the time. According to email exchanges between Zuckerberg and former CFO David Ebersman made public by the US House antitrust committee, the company wanted to purchase Instagram to avoid competition. They saw IG as a potential threat to the social network, which could take business away from Facebook. Other sources say that the real reason Facebook became the owner of Instagram was to fend off competition from Google+ and Twitter.

No, Facebook does no own TikTok. The popular video hosting service is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese multinational IT corporation headquartered in Beijing. Interestingly enough, while it does not own the video sharing app, Facebook has an account on TikTok. The account seems to have been set up in March, 2022, and it is verified and confirmed to be legitimate.

No, never in the history of Facebook has the social networking platform been owned by Google. Facebook is a publicly owned company, with its largest three shareholders being Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Breyer & Accel Partners, and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Facebook keeps repeating in its privacy policies and public statements that it does not sell your data to third parties. And if we were to take that literally, it’s absolutely true. The company indeed doesn’t sell your data – not directly. What it sells instead is targeted advertising, allowing third parties to use the data Facebook has on you to show you personalized ads.