History of Facebook

Facemash
In early 2003, Adam D'Angelo, then a Caltech student who had been Mark Zuckerberg's supporter in highschool, had developed the experimental, rudimentary social networking web site Buddy Zoo, that was utilized by many thousands of individuals before D'Angelo shut it down. That summer, Zuckerberg and friends who were conjointly laptop science students worked coding for the summer in Boston and mentioned the implication of D'Angelo's website's success with regard to the longer term of social networking on the web.
In the fall, Zuckerberg, returning for his sophomore year at Harvard, wrote CourseMatch, a briefly fashionable web site that helped Harvard students fathom what courses their friends were taking;
and then, on October twenty eight, 2003, he wrote Facemash, a web site that, per the Harvard Crimson, represented a harvard University version of Hot or Not.
That night, Zuckerberg created the subsequent blog entries:
 i am to a small degree intoxicated, not gonna lie. therefore what if it is not even ten pm and it is a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and a few of those individuals have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I nearly wish to place a number of these faces next to photos of cattle and have individuals vote on that is a lot of enticing.
    —9:48 pm

    Yea, it's on. i am not specifically certain how the cattle are about to work into this whole issue (you cannot very ever make sure with cattle...), however i favor the thought of comparing 2 individuals along.
    —11:09 pm

    Let the hacking begin.
    —12:58 am



According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the web facebooks of 9 homes, inserting 2 next to every alternative at a time and asking users to settle on the 'hotter' person". To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's laptop network and copied the houses' non-public dormitory ID pictures.
Harvard at that point didn't have a student directory with photos, and basic info and also the initial web site generated 450 guests and twenty two,000 photo-views in its initial four hours on-line. That the initial web site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook
"Perhaps Harvard can squelch it for legal reasons while not realizing its worth as a venture that would probably be expanded to alternative faculties (maybe even ones with good-looking individuals...)," Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog. "But one issue is definite, and it’s that I’m a jerk for creating this web site. Oh well. somebody had to try and do it eventually..." the positioning was quickly forwarded to many campus cluster list-servers however was finish off a number of days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion, however ultimately the costs were dropped.

Zuckerberg expanded on this first project that semester by making a social study tool previous an art history final by uploading five hundred Augustan pictures to a web site, with one image per page along side a comment section. He opened the positioning up to his classmates and other people started sharing their notes. "The professor said it had the simplest grades of any final he’d ever given. This was my initial social hack. With Facebook, I wished create|to form|to create} one thing that will make Harvard a lot of open," Zuckerberg said in an exceedingly TechCrunch interview.

On Oct 25, 2010, entrepreneur and banker Rahul Jain auctioned off FaceMash.com to an unknown buyer for $30,201.

A recreation of the first web site may be seen at "facemasher.com"

Thefacebook
In January 2004, the subsequent semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a replacement web site. He was galvanized, he said, by a writing within the Harvard Crimson regarding the Facemash incident. "It is evident that the technology required to make a centralized web site is quickly obtainable," the paper observed. "The edges are several."  On February four, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.  "Everyone’s been talking plenty a couple of universal face book at intervals Harvard," Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson. "I assume it’s quite silly that it might take the University a few of years to induce around to it. I will do it higher than they will, and that i will do it in an exceedingly week."  "When Mark finished the positioning, he told a few of friends. And then one in all them instructed putting it on the Kirkland House on-line mailing list, which was...three hundred individuals," per roommate Dustin Moskovitz. "And, once they did that, many dozen individuals joined, and then they were telling individuals at the opposite homes. By the tip of the night, we were...actively watching the registration method. at intervals 24 hours, we tend to had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants."

Just six days once the positioning launched, 3 Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would facilitate them build a social network referred to as HarvardConnection.com, whereas he was instead using their concepts to make a competing product.

The 3 complained to the Harvard Crimson and also the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg used his web site, TheFacebook.com, to appear up members of the positioning who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to ascertain if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. within the cases during which that they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed 2 of them. The 3 later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, later settling.

Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard school, and at intervals the primary month, quite [*fr1] the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to assist promote the web site. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This enlargement continued when it opened to any or all Ivy League and Boston space faculties, and gradually most universities in Canada and also the us. Facebook incorporated within the summer of 2004 and also the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. the corporate dropped The from its name once getting the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

Facebook
On October one, 2005, Facebook expanded to twenty-one universities within the uk, the complete Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) system in Mexico, the complete University of Puerto Rico network in Puerto Rico, and also the whole University of the Virgin Islands network within the U.S. Virgin Islands. Facebook launched a highschool version in September 2005, that Zuckerberg referred to as succeeding logical step.  At that point, highschool networks needed missive of invitation to affix.  Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to workers of many firms, as well as Apple Inc. and Microsoft.  On December eleven, 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to a pair of,000+ faculties and twenty five,000 + high faculties throughout the us, Canada, Mexico, the uk, Australia, New Zealand, and eire. Facebook was then opened on September twenty six, 2006, to everybody of ages thirteen and older with a legitimate e-mail address.  In October 2008, Facebook announced that it had been to line up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.

Recently, Facemash.com was the highest social network across eight individual markets within the Southeast Asia/Oceania region (Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam), whereas alternative brands commanded the highest positions in sure markets, as well as Google-owned Orkut in India and Brazil, Mixi.jp in Japan, RenRen in China (where Facebook is currently inaccessible), CyWorld in South Korea and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc in Taiwan.[citation needed] Additionally, Facebook has become the most important on-line photo host, being cited by Facebook application and on-line photo aggregator Pixable as expecting to possess a hundred billion photos by summer 2011

In 2010 Facebook began to pro-actively involve its users in running the web site by inviting them to become beta testers once passing a question-and-answer-based choice method, and conjointly by making a replacement section called Facebook Engineering Puzzles where users would solve computational issues and then doubtless be employed by Facebook.

Financials
Facebook received its initial investment of US$500,000 in June 2004 from PayPal  co-founder Peter Thiel, in exchange for seven-membered of the corporate.  This was followed a year later by $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then $27.5 million a lot of from Greylock Partners.  A leaked money flow statement showed that in the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a internet loss of $3.63 million.

With the sale of social networking web site MySpace to News Corp on July nineteen, 2005, rumors surfaced regarding the potential sale of Facebook to a bigger media company. Zuckerberg had already said he didn't wish to sell the corporate, and denied rumors to the contrary. On March twenty eight, 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a possible acquisition of Facebook was underneath negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined a suggestion of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it had been rumored the asking worth rose as high as $2 billion.

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! happened regarding acquisition of Facebook, with costs reaching as high as $1 billion. Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based mostly on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, adore Viacom's MTV complete, a corporation with a shared target demographic audience.

On July 17, 2007, Zuckerberg said that selling Facebook was unlikely as a result of he wished to stay it freelance, saying "We're not very trying to sell the corporate... We're not trying to IPO anytime soon. It's simply not the core focus of the corporate." In September 2007, Microsoft approached Facebook, proposing an investment in come for a five-hitter stake within the company, giving an estimated $300–500 million. That month, alternative firms, as well as Google, expressed interest in shopping for a little of Facebook.

On October twenty four, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a one.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a complete implied worth of around $15 billion. However, Microsoft bought most popular stock that carried special rights, like "liquidation preferences" that meant Microsoft would get paid before common stockholders if the corporate is sold. Microsoft's purchase conjointly included rights to position international ads on Facebook. In November 2007, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook.
In August 2008, BusinessWeek reported that personal sales by workers, furthermore as purchases by venture capital companies, had and were being done at share costs that place the company's total valuation at between $3.75 billion and $5 billion.  In October 2008, Zuckerberg said "I do not assume social networks may be monetized within the same means that search did... In 3 years from currently we've got to work out what the optimum model is. however that's not our primary focus nowadays."

In August 2009, Facebook acquired social media real-time news aggregator FriendFeed, a startup created by the previous Google employee and Gmail's initial engineer Paul Buchheit who, whereas at Google, coined the phrase "Don't be evil". In September 2009, Facebook claimed that it had turned money flow positive for the primary time.[60] In February 2010, Facebook acquired Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions. On April 2, 2010, Facebook announced acquisition of photo-sharing service referred to as Divvyshot for an undisclosed quantity. In June 2010, an internet marketplace for trading non-public company stock mirrored a valuation of $11.5 billion.

At the All Things Digital conference in June 2010, Zuckerberg was asked if he expected to stay CEO if the corporate went public. Zuckerberg said he did, adding that he does not "think regarding going public ... much." He said he didn't have a date in mind for a possible IPO.