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Life without networking sites, especially Facebook, would be difficult for many. Logging into Facebook is as much of a daily part of our lives as going to work in the morning and sleeping at night. Facebook is an easy way to stay in touch with old college buddies and reconnect with long lost friends. In the matter of a few years Facebook has become the most dominant of networking sites. In its’ ascend to dominancy Facebook revolutionized the way we communicate with each other. The following is the story of the Facebook phenomenon.

On February 4th, 2004 23 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerburg launched thefacebook.com. Within 24 hours of its launch 1,200 Harvard students had created profiles on the website. After a month half of Harvard’s undergraduate students had accounts. Zuckerburg ran thefacebook.com as a hobby. Seeing how successful his networking site was Zuckerburg expanded the site to other Ivy League schools like Stafford and Yale. Seeing the website’s success reciprocated at other Ivy League schools, Zuckerburg made thefacebook.com available to colleges across the country. Zuckerburg dropped out of Harvard in order to run his networking site fulltime.

Image by deneyterrio via Flickr

In August 2005 thefacebook.com changed its domain name and became known simply as Facebook. As Facebook expanded to more and more colleges the networking site gained more and more momentum. The networking site was then made available to high school students. Facebook continued to gain momentum, eventually extending its’ demographic past academic institutions to include anybody with a registered e-mail address. Once Facebook was made available to anybody with an e-mail address it was only a matter of time before the networking site dominated all other networking sites.

Ironically Facebook was almost shut down before the site grew. Some of Zuckerburg’s peers accused him of stealing code from their networking site, connectu.com. Zuckerburg denied the allegations. In a lawsuit the court ruled in favor of Mark Zuckerburg.

The ConnectU lawsuit was foreshadowing of future controversy. In 2007 Facebook users were appalled to find out that Facebook installed Beacon, a tracking tool which tracks credit card purchases, on profiles. To amend the situation Zuckerburg gave Facebook users the options to turn Beacon off. In February 2009 Facebook faced controversy again when they updated their privacy policy. The new privacy policy made it seem like Facebook was claiming all material posted on the website as their property. Zuckerburg denied these claims and remedied the situation by going back to the old privacy policy.

Facebook is currently the king of networking sites, with over 175 million people having accounts. Facebook defines their mission on their website as “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

SOURCES
1. Facebook
2. Guardian
3. Mashable
4. Winnipeg Sun