February, 2004 saw Thefacebook launch. With a slightly different name, the platform was familiar. It had a profile where you could upload a photo, share your interests, and connect with other people. It also offered a network visualization of your connections.
Initially this was only opened to people with a Harvard email address and within the first month 50% of the college’s student’s had signed up. But there was a big problem Zuckerberg had to deal with from the off. He was being sued.
Zuckerberg ad previously worked on a similar project with fellow students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra. He eventually quit to do this one thing, Thefacebook. But this ex-collaborators say he stole their concept and ideas and they wanted recompense.
They eventually came to a settlement in 2008, with each of the trio receiving 1.2m shares in the Facebook company. By the IPO, these were worth $300m, but more on the IPO later.
Thefacebook was an instant hit and interest grew and grew and grew. By the end of 2004, membership was open to nearly all universities in the US and Canada and people were clamouring to sign up.
June of that year also saw Zuckerberg move the company’s operations to Palo Alto, California and secured some important investment. Co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, joined the board and brought with him $500,000.
In May 2005 TheFacebook received more money. This time investments of $12.7m from Accel and $1m from the personal fortune of venture capitalist Jim Breyer. People were really paying attention now.
In August the ‘the’ was dropped and the company officially became Facebook (the facebook.com domain cost $200,000). The following month high school students are admitted, along with employees of Microsoft and Apple. The company was now ready to move beyond its student base.
Then in November Zuckerberg took an important decisions about his own life. Having taken the semester off from Harvard, he announced he was leaving entirely, returning briefly to hire some new employees. After significant investment and a growing membership, Zuckerberg was ready to fully dedicate himself to running his company, as a CEO rather than a programmer.
You heard of this thing called Facebook?
With the Zuck at the helm full-time, Facebook continued its expansion plans. In December Australian and New Zealand universities were included, along with high schools from Mexico, the UK, and Ireland. That meant there were now 2,500 colleges and 25,000 high schools with access to Facebook.
It wasn’t until September 2006 when the platform became open for everyone (well, anyone over 13 with a valid email address). Facebook had now gone fully global. We also started to see the rate of membership growth:
December 2006: 12m
April 2007: 20m
July 2007: 30m
October 2007: 50m
In May 2007, Facebook open their Marketplace, which lets users post classifieds to sell products and services. It also saw the launch of the Facebook Application Developer platform, opening the gates for developers to create their own applications and games that integrated with Facebook.
The platform was also looking beyond personal profiles to how businesses could use the site. By the end of 2007 over 100,000 companies had signed up, with Facebook launching Pages for Businesses to support this. Already they’re making plans to build on existing ad revenue to make advertising on the platform accessible to even the smallest of businesses.
Then in 2008 we see a huge release from Facebook. April, 2008 saw Facebook Chat roll out, allow us to more instantly annoy our friends and family. Essentially, the concept is no different to ZuckNet. We also see the People You May Know, Facebook Wall, and Facebook Connect released in the same year.
Meanwhile the user count continues to grow:
August, 2008: 100m
January, 2009: 150m
February 2009: 175m
April, 2009: 200m
July, 2009: 250m
September, 2009: 300m
