The social media website that presently has over a billion active users from possibly every country on the planet actually had a very very humble beginning. The idea was conceived in a Harvard dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates. Although its formation may have been mired in controversy and lawsuits, there is no doubt that the largest social networking site on the planet has changed the way we communicate with people and conduct business online.
An exclusive network for students
When Facebook was launched, it did face a lot of competition from other well established social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace. However, it was able to attract the key section that any social networking site intends to thrive on– young college students. Facebook, that was an offshoot of Facemash, was not available to everybody when it was launched officially in August 2005. Before its domain name was officially registered, only students from Harvard could sign up. Zuckerberg and his team then launched the site in famous colleges in the US making it seem like an exclusive phenomenon. It was made available to everyone, only much later – since September 2006.
Improvements in service
By September 2005, the social networking site was open to all US schools and by the next month it was fast spreading in UK too. This attracted a lot of attention from major players like Yahoo! and Google, who were interested in buying the site for a reported $2 billion, but Zuckerberg refused to sell and instead worked hard on making Facebook an irresistible social networking site for people. By 2007, users of Facebook were able to send other gifts, develop their own applications including games to run on Facebook and create free ads. This led to a huge surge in its popularity and the company announced that it had 30 million registered users by July 2007.
Facebook Groups became an immense success on launch as this feature allowed people with similar interests to come together. The site is constantly updated with user profiles being streamlined and packed with more information. Although the ‘Wall’ was very popular, it was scrapped in 2011 and replaced by the Timeline on December 15, 2011.
Integration with external websites
The company was quick to realize that Facebook users want to share everything they do, even outside the site, with their Facebook friends. In April 2010, Facebook allowed the like button to be installed on other websites allowing users to share their activities outside Facebook to others. By September 2010, the like button was present on close to 350,000 sites. In a few months time, websites were able to customize the Like button on their websites to make them more appropriate so now we see “Recommend”, “Suggest to Friends” and “Share” buttons too. Since April 2010, community pages were launched so that content from Wikipedia would be available on Facebook without users having to navigate away from the site.
Perfect platform for businesses
By late 2007, Facebook was home to over 10,000 business pages. The company realized how much revenue could be earned from ads. Although the site did allow an advertising campaign by J.P. Morgan Chase in August, 2006, it wasn’t until April, 2008 that Facebook Ads was launched allowing all businesses to create ads to be displayed on Facebook. Advertising got better on Facebook with the launch of Engagement Ads in August 2008 and ad targeting features in March, 2009. Further targeting options based on birthdays, country, and so on were launched in 2009 and Sponsored Stories was added in March, 2011. With the launch of Mobile Ads, it now earns about $2.59 billion from ads alone.
In the last two years, the Timeline and Newsfeed features have undergone massive changes in the way information is delivered to users. Pictures are given more importance and advertising on Facebook is getting easier and for some people – more intrusive. On June 12, 2013, Hashtags were introduced and in July, Graph Search was launched. Both allow users to search and classify information more easily. These are just some of the few changes that have been seen on Facebook over the past few years. 10 years have passed eventfully and the next 10 are bound to be as exciting.
By Facebook (facebook.com) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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