When did Facebook start? The story behind a company that took over the world | Social
In 2004, a group of friends at college created an innovative new social media platform with the aim of connecting Harvard students through an online community.
14 years later, Facebook is one the most influential social networks in the world, boasting approximately 2.2 billion monthly users.
So how did a social network created in the confines of a Harvard dorm room go from being a student trend to an unprecedented, worldwide phenomenon?
Zuckerberg loses billions amid dramatic Facebook share price drop
It all began in 2003, when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg created an online programme called “Facemash”, which allowed users to objectify fellow students by comparing photos of their faces and selecting who they deemed as “hotter”.
While Zuckerberg faced punishment from the Harvard administration and narrowly escaped expulsion from the college altogether for his actions, “Facemash” provided the framework for what was to become Facebook.
Online “face books” already existed at Harvard at the time. These were online directories that featured photos of students alongside some information about them.
There wasn’t a single “face book” for the whole student body of Harvard university, which is why Zuckerberg came up with the idea to create one.
11 useful Facebook features you didn’t know existed
1/11 Clean up your News Feed
Most of us are Facebook friends with some people we don’t actually care about, and there are several ways to keep their updates off your News Feed. The easiest option is to head to the column on the left and open News Feed Preferences. From here, you can prioritise friends, unfollow friends, refollow friends you unfollowed in the past and even block specific apps.
2/11 Change ad preferences
You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. Just open Settings and select Advert Preferences.
3/11 Manage notifications
You can get notifications about pretty much anything on Facebook these days, and that can be seriously irritating. Choose what you do and don’t want to be notified about by going into the Settings menu and selecting Notifications. You might be surprised by the number of sections you have to trawl through.
4/11 Save data
Facebook automatically plays videos in your News Feed, and that’s a problem if you aren’t on a generous data plan. You can change this by going to Videos in the Settings menu and disabling autoplay. On the app, there’s feature in the left-hand column called Data Saver, which also does this, but reduces the size of pictures too.
5/11 Reorder your News feed
You can choose to order the updates that appear in your News Feed by time or importance. Just hit the three buttons next to News Feed Preferences on the Facebook site and choose between Top Stories and Recent Stories.
6/11 Download your data
Facebook lets you download all of the immense amounts of data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a lot of information, which you’ll want to get your hands on if you decide to quit the social network.
7/11 Find nearby places
Nearby Places is actually a really handy tool, which lets you quickly find and research things like restaurants, hotels, museums and nightlife hotspots around you. It lives in the left-hand column, and also shows useful information like customer ratings, prices and distance.
8/11 Find free Wi-Fi
Similarly, Find Wi-Fi is ideal for when you’re bored, running low on data or lost. It shows you all the places in your vicinity that offer free Wi-Fi, so you can head over and either relax or get some work done.
9/11 Save things for later
Facebook’s ideal for killing time, but every now and again you’ll stumble across something you’re interested in right as you need to put your phone away. Fortunately, you can save posts for later by hitting the arrow in the top-right corner and selecting the Save option. Everything you save goes straight to the Saved section in the left-hand column.
10/11 Control tags
When people tag you in posts or pictures, they don’t have to automatically appear on your profile. You can switch on Facebook’s Review Tags feature by going to Settings and Timeline and Tagging.
11/11 Delete your account
To permanently delete your Facebook account, you need to head to Facebook’s Delete Account page. The site can take up to 90 days to process account deletion requests, but once your account’s gone, it’s gone. You can deactivate your account instead, by going to Security and Login in the Settings menu.
1/11 Clean up your News Feed
Most of us are Facebook friends with some people we don’t actually care about, and there are several ways to keep their updates off your News Feed. The easiest option is to head to the column on the left and open News Feed Preferences. From here, you can prioritise friends, unfollow friends, refollow friends you unfollowed in the past and even block specific apps.
2/11 Change ad preferences
You can view a list of everything Facebook thinks you’re into and tinker with your ad preferences. A lot more information is displayed on the desktop site than the app, so we’d recommend doing this on a computer. Just open Settings and select Advert Preferences.
3/11 Manage notifications
You can get notifications about pretty much anything on Facebook these days, and that can be seriously irritating. Choose what you do and don’t want to be notified about by going into the Settings menu and selecting Notifications. You might be surprised by the number of sections you have to trawl through.
4/11 Save data
Facebook automatically plays videos in your News Feed, and that’s a problem if you aren’t on a generous data plan. You can change this by going to Videos in the Settings menu and disabling autoplay. On the app, there’s feature in the left-hand column called Data Saver, which also does this, but reduces the size of pictures too.
5/11 Reorder your News feed
You can choose to order the updates that appear in your News Feed by time or importance. Just hit the three buttons next to News Feed Preferences on the Facebook site and choose between Top Stories and Recent Stories.
6/11 Download your data
Facebook lets you download all of the immense amounts of data it has on you, including the posts you’ve shared, your messages and photos, ads you’ve clicked on and even the IP addresses that are logged when you log in or out of the site. It’s a lot of information, which you’ll want to get your hands on if you decide to quit the social network.
7/11 Find nearby places
Nearby Places is actually a really handy tool, which lets you quickly find and research things like restaurants, hotels, museums and nightlife hotspots around you. It lives in the left-hand column, and also shows useful information like customer ratings, prices and distance.
8/11 Find free Wi-Fi
Similarly, Find Wi-Fi is ideal for when you’re bored, running low on data or lost. It shows you all the places in your vicinity that offer free Wi-Fi, so you can head over and either relax or get some work done.
9/11 Save things for later
Facebook’s ideal for killing time, but every now and again you’ll stumble across something you’re interested in right as you need to put your phone away. Fortunately, you can save posts for later by hitting the arrow in the top-right corner and selecting the Save option. Everything you save goes straight to the Saved section in the left-hand column.
10/11 Control tags
When people tag you in posts or pictures, they don’t have to automatically appear on your profile. You can switch on Facebook’s Review Tags feature by going to Settings and Timeline and Tagging.
11/11 Delete your account
To permanently delete your Facebook account, you need to head to Facebook’s Delete Account page. The site can take up to 90 days to process account deletion requests, but once your account’s gone, it’s gone. You can deactivate your account instead, by going to Security and Login in the Settings menu.
On February 4 2004, the first iteration of Facebook was born, then known as thefacebook.com and made available exclusively to Harvard students.
However, the truth about how Facebook came about isn’t altogether clear, due to the involvement of three Harvard seniors.
Six days after “TheFacebook” was made live by Zuckerberg and co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, they faced accusations by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra that the idea for the site had been stolen from them.
According to the Winklevoss twins and Narendra, they had approached Zuckerberg asking for his assistance in creating a social network for Harvard students called “HarvardConnection”.
This claim was explored in the 2010 Oscar-winning film The Social Network, which depicted Zuckerberg meeting with the Winklevoss brothers and Narendra to discuss their idea before creating his own without their knowledge.
Following a lawsuit filed against Zuckerberg, eventually all three received a settlement in 2008 that included 1.2 million shares in the company each.
Facebook proved extremely popular with Harvard students when it was first launched, so much so that the site was soon also made available to students at Stanford, Yale and Columbia before expanding to numerous other colleges.
By September 26 2006, anyone in the world could make themselves a Facebook account, as long as they were at least 13 years old and had a valid email address.
One year prior, the social media platform had officially become “Facebook”, as opposed to “TheFacebook” as it’d formerly been known.
As the number of people becoming members of Facebook grew, so did the number of people working for the company.
In 2004, Napster co-founder Sean Parker was named president of Facebook. He’d come across the site while browsing the computer of a student at Stanford and had become acquainted with Zuckerberg and Saverin soon thereafter.
At this point, Facebook had moved its headquarters to Palo Alto in California.
Zuckerberg’s issues with co-founder and former close friend Saverin were also explored in The Social Network.
Having been chief financial officer and business manager for Facebook since its conception, Saverin was reportedly cut from Facebook by Zuckerberg in 2005 and had his shares in the company diluted.
This led to Saverin filing a lawsuit against Facebook, which was settled outside of court.
Lately, Facebook has become embroiled in controversy concerning the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and Brexit.
It was recently revealed that personal data from 87 million Facebook accounts had been wrongfully shared with Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm.
This allowed Cambridge Analytica to target Facebook users with political advertisements during the 2016 US presidential elections and the UK referendum, which in turn could have swayed their stance on either topic.
So what does the future hold for Facebook?
In July, it was reported that the company had lost more than $100bn (£78bn) in value, with its share price dropping by nearly 20 per cent.
While Facebook has acquired various other companies such as Instagram to maintain their users’ interest, the question of whether its popularity will rise yet again remains uncertain.