It has surpassed 2,500 million users and is the social network for all . No one doubts that it is the most important social platform in the world since the Internet became popular a little over 20 years ago and by now it already has a long biography worth telling in a memoir. For this reason, we are going to stop and explain a little how the facebook story from its origins… until now.
Facebook Story: A Social Network for Harvard Students
The history of Facebook begins in October 2003, when a very young (were you wondering who created Facebook?) It occurs to him to create a website to entertain his Harvard classmates. the site was called face mash and it served so that students could judge the attractiveness of other students and make rankings. Two days later the site was closed for using photos without permission, but in this time it had already reached more than 22,000 image views.
This success led him to create a new social network with his peers. Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes on February 4, 2004. The platform was called ‘The Facebook’ and was only available to people with a Harvard email address. There was a profile where users could connect with other peopleshare interests, and include personal information like their class schedules and clubs they belonged to.
At one month of life, 50% of students from Harvard were already enrolled. At that time, ‘The Facebook’ began to enable other Universities such as Yale, Columbia and Stanford. The interest was growing considerably and towards the end of 2004 the social network is open to almost all universities in the US and Canada with around a million users.
Moving to Silicon Valley… with a millionaire investment
The success was such that the founder of Facebook decides to rent a house in Palo Alto in California to set up the company’s operations center. Also, it is associated with Sean Parkerthe founder of Napster, and gets a very important investment from €450,000 ($500,000) from the co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel.
Facebook makes its name official and opens to the world
2005 is a key year in the history of Facebook. First, the social network loses the “The” and officially becomes Facebook and it already allows you to tag people in photos. Second, it opens up to more users and allows high school and university students from other countries (Mexico, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) to access the social network. At the end of the year, Facebook already had about 6 million active users monthly.
In the same way, 2006 is also a key year in the history of FacebookAt least as far as design is concerned. The social network still had a design that was quite reminiscent of MySpace, so it was change where the profile picture gained prominence and the font was more pleasing to the eye. Equally, the NewsFeed is added so that the user can see the activity of their contacts directly in the profile.
September 2006 is also a momentous date in the history of Facebook because finally the platform goes global and it is open to everyone – specifically to those over 13 years of age with an email address.
A social network also for political movements
The following year, Facebook continues to add features such as the or the Facebook Application Developer, a service that allows developers to create their own apps and games integrated into the social network. And in 2008, Facebook overtakes MySpace as the most visited social network.
On the other hand, at this time, Facebook is already beginning to stand out as a very powerful tool when it comes to political movements. It can be seen with the US presidential election in 2008, when they formed over 1,000 groups on the platform in support of the two candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain.
History of Facebook: 2009, the year it became the most popular platform in the world
Five years after his birth, on February 9, 2009 Facebook activate the iconic “like” button. Although that year will go down in Facebook history as the year in which the social network became the most popular platform in the world, with 350 million registered users and 132 million monthly unique users.
If this were not enough, in 2010 Facebook is valued at more than 37,000 million euros, becoming the third largest web company in the US, only behind Google and Amazon. This is also the time when David Fincher’s popular film “The Social Network” is released, which tells the most turbulent details of the origin of Facebook.
If you can’t beat the enemy… buy Instagram
It is in 2011 when Facebook begins to give greater importance to images on the platform, including the cover photo in its interface. I also know implant the timeline to organize the posts in chronological order. This last feature didn’t like it very much to users as it brought up old posts and photos – of which they were sometimes not very proud.
A year later, one of the most important movements in the history of Facebook takes place. Zuckerberg’s social platform acquires Instagram for about a billion euros and also goes public. On the other hand, it reaches beastly figure of a billion active users per month (one in 7 people on the planet has used Facebook). That is, a very sweet candy for investors and advertisers.
and whatsapp too
The acquisition of the competitor (Instagram) went so well that Zuckerberg tried to buy Snapchat, albeit without success. Even so, two years later, in February 2014. In this way, he manages to consolidate his dominance of social media by monopolizing messaging applications as well. In the same year he makes another important purchase and acquires the virtual reality company Oculus VR.
That is to say: if we add the figures of Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, the global community of Zuckerberg platforms exceeds 5 billion users. An astonishing number… that does not stop growing.
And while you’re at it, buy GIPHY
In May 2020, Vishal Shah, vice president of product at Facebook announced that “Giphy, leader in creation and visual expression joins the Facebook company today as part of the Instagram team”.
According to the statement, with the idea of add your huge catalog to the images available to share on Instagram but “also in our other applications so that people can find the right way to express themselves.”
History of Facebook: recent years full of scandals
It is true that in recent years Facebook has not made many important changes, just some variations in its design, the inclusion of verified accounts or Facebook Stories. Unfortunately, in recent years has stood out more for the controversies such as the problem of fake news or the controversy with the use of data from , where Zuckerberg himself had to appear before the US Congress. This last fact was the biggest Facebook scandal, which caused Zuckerberg’s company to lose some 40 million euros.
However, Facebook is still mired in claims that it allows dissemination of and dangerous propaganda on your site. More recently, Facebook, and Zuckerberg in particular, have been accused of doing nothing to curb racist and hate speech on the platform, and even allegedly encouraging the spread of such speech through politics. of the company. In for this reason, those who stated that they no longer wanted their ads to appear next to posts from hate groups.
The good news for Zuckerberg is that Facebook has managed to far exceed the number of two billion monthly active users. An unprecedented figure for a web platform like yours.
Facebook Vs TikTok
For Facebook, it has been its modus operandi to remain relevant in many areas: a strategy that, for example, worked quite well with Instagram stories that capture the attention of millions of users around the world every day.
Facebook Lasso emerged in 2018 as an application that sought to attract younger users with a format that has been the sensation in recent years: the microvideo. But after many attempts, in 2020 after losing the battle against the queen of microvideo . However, Facebook has not stopped fighting to enter that niche, and in August 2020 it launches in more than 50 countries.
This function, originally called “Clips”was intended to allow users to record video segments in a single story… in the style of TikTok, since it also they can add music and adjust the speed and timing of each video clip. Over time, that function became a reality… and it changed its name.
But this launch only heated up the open war that it maintains with the Chinese app, since in order for them to use this new function exclusively, to which TikTok responded by asking for free competition and accusing Facebook of “patriotism” and of wanting to get them out of the game. US market.
To this day, despite the ups and downs, Facebook remains the most important social network and together with Instagram dominates the spectrum of social media. Of course, today it seems that Facebook has achieved everything, but you still have to face new challenges. It is not enough to focus on innovation to stay on top, the latest controversies force Zuckerberg and his team to pay special attention to innovation. data protection, privacy and fake news.
Certainly, a new stage to observe in the social network that was able to write the destiny of the Internet more than a decade ago.
Facebook changes its name and becomes Meta
A end of October 2021Mark Zuckerberg’s company took advantage of its annual management meeting, , to make the big announcement that had been rumored for weeks: the change of name of the company (not of the social network) in search of a new image oriented to the . The gossips also said that the change responded to a need to “clean up” the company’s worn imagewhich received heavy blows with the unfavorable internal documents.
Ultimately, the important thing is that Facebook became Meta and so Zuckerberg himself clarified in a letter addressed to his staff: «“From now on, Facebook will be prioritized, not Facebook. That means that over time you won’t need a Facebook account to use our other services. As our new branding begins to appear on our products, I hope that people around the world will recognize the Meta brand and the future we represent.”
Zuckerberg would have made a much better Bond villain than Rami Malek
— Conor Gogarty (@ConorGogarty)
, Meta will also launch new devices and tools to help build the metaverse, as the evolution of the platform, with integrations…
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