Facemash-Thefacebook-Facebook

Facebook! Facebook and Facebook! The giant of social media and the bringer of revolutions. From the generation of Angel Priya to Good Morning Ji, Facebook has been through a lot.

This Throwback Thursday, we’ll be talking about a site which knows everything about me, you and the whole world i.e Facebook.

Facebook dates back to 2004, where we were still writing letters and keeping a track of written records of people in cringy directories. But the lesser known thing, before Thefacebook, Mark Zuckerberg started a Website called Facemash, which was taken down by the Harvard University in 2 days after it created 21000 traffic clicks in a moment of days.

On a Tuesday night, Mark wrote,

“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 p.m. and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

followed by,

“Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals …), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.“

This hot or not game successfully implanted an idea of a centralized website for a University where people can add their details and be in touch with each other.

In 2004, Mark launched a website ‘Thefacebook’ with another student Eduardo Saverin , with the intention of creating a platform for Harvard Students to upload their details and connect with people.

The registration was first limited to Harvard University, which was then expanded to many other Universities for marketing and generating revenue.

Thefacebook to Facebook

The entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president.The company dropped ‘The‘ from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

Facebook made itself available to the whole world on Sept. 26′ 2006 where anyone above the age of 13 and with a valid email address can sign himself up.

Since then, facebook has seen an exponential growth in both the number of users as well as features. It faced many challenges from similar apps like Google+, but it managed to be on the top.

In 2012, Facebook acquired the much more used app nowadays, Instagram for $1 billion and In 2014, Facebook acquired the most widely used Messenger Whatsapp for a whooping $16 billion + $3 billion in restricted stocks.

Till date, Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are available for free to people all over the globe and the major source of revenue is from the ads we see while using them. Hadn’t it been Facebook, the way we socialize might be a complete different scenario but who knows, right Schrodinger?