Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University student

Eduardo saverin......

The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League

@1@Facemash

@2@ thefacebook.com

@3@ facebook

@4@ financials

@1@ initial funding

@2@ first angel

@3@ accel investment

@4@ greylock investment(Series A )

@5@ sales

@6@ mic rosoft investment

@7@ switch to profitability

@8@ acquistions

 

{facemash}......

 

the Facebook’s predecessor, opened on October 28, 2003.[8] Initially, the website was invented by a Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, and three of his classmates – Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz. Zuckerberg wrote the software for the Facemash website when he was in his second year of college. The website was set up as a type of “hot or not” game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two student pictures side-by-side and let them decide who was hot or not.

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

 

According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". To accomplish this, Mark Zuckerberg hacked the "facebooks" Harvard maintained to help students identify each other and used the images to populate his Facemash website.[12] That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.[

 

Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final. He uploaded 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.[13] He opened the site up to his classmates and people started sharing their notes. "The professor said it had the best grades of any final he’d ever given. This was my first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would make Harvard more open," Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview.

{the facebook.com}...........

 

In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began writing the code for a new website, known as 'theFacebook. He said in an article in The Harvard Crimson that he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash: "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."[9] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[18] He told The Crimson, "Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard. I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it as I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."[19] Zuckerberg also stated his intention to create a universal website that can connect people around the university. According to his roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, "When Mark finished the site, he told a couple of friends ... then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which was ... three hundred people." Moskovitz continued to say that, “By the end of the night, we were ... actively watching the registration process. Within twenty-four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants."[20]

 

 

Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members have ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22] U Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard University. Within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.[23] Zuckerberg was soon joined in the promotion of the site by Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[2] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston-area schools. It gradually reached most universities in Canada and the United States.[24][25][26] Facebook was incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.[27] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[2] The company dropped ‘The’ from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[2

 

{facebook}

 

On October 1, 2005, Facebook expanded to twenty-one universities in the United Kingdom and others around the world. Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[42] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.[43] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[44] On December 11, 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to 2,000+ colleges and 25,000 + high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone aged 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.[6][7] Late in 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages, allowing companies to attract potential customers and tell about themselves. These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned.[45]

 

 

{accel investment}(series A)

 

In April 2005, Accel Partners agreed to make a $12.7 million venture capital investment in a deal that valued Facebook at $98 million. Accel joined Facebook's board, and the board was expanded to five seats, with Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Breyer in three of the seats, and the other two seats currently being empty but with Zuckerberg free to nominate anybody to those seats.[60]

 

{Greylock investment (Series B)

 

In April 2006, Facebook closed its Series B funding round. This included $27.5 million from a number of venture capitalists, including Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, plus additional investments from Peter Thiel and Accel Partners. The valuation for this round was about $500 million.[58][61][62] A leaked cash flow statement showed that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net gain of $5.66 million.[63]

 

N0tes

1@  An "active user" is defined by Facebook as a user who has visited the website in the last 30 days.

2@ "Monthly growth" is the average percentage growth rate at which the total number of active users grows each month over the specified period.

3@  This value is from an investment document. The date is from when the document was revealed to the public, not the actual date that the website reached this many users.

 

facebook

 

Facebook filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on February 1, 2012.[94] The preliminary prospectus stated that the company was seeking to raise $5 billion. The document announced that the company had 845 million active monthly users and its website featured 2.7 billion daily likes and comments.[95] After the IPO, Zuckerberg will retain a 22% ownership share in Facebook and will own 57% of the voting shares.[96] Underwriters valued the shares at $38 each, pricing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly public company.[97] On May 16, one day before the IPO, Facebook announced that it would sell 25% more shares than originally planned due to high demand.[98] The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history (just ahead of AT&T Wireless and behind only General Motors and Visa Inc.).[99][100] The stock price left the company with a higher market capitalization than all but a few U.S. corporations – surpassing heavyweights such as Amazon.com, McDonald's, Disney, and Kraft Foods – and made Zuckerberg's stock worth $19 billion.[99][100] The New York Times stated that the offering overcame questions about Facebook's difficulties in attracting advertisers to transform the company into a "must-own stock". Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase described it as "the next great blue-chip".[99] Writers at TechCrunch, on the other hand, expressed skepticism, stating, "That's a big multiple to live up to, and [Facebook] will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation".[101] Trading in the stock, which began on May 18, was delayed that day due to technical problems with the NASDAQ exchange.[102] The stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, forcing underwriters to buy back shares to support the price.[103] At closing bell, shares were valued at $38.23,[104] only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value. The opening was widely described by the financial press as a disappointment.[105] The stock nonetheless set a new record for trading volume of an IPO.[106] On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline.[107] On 22 May, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients, rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin subpeonaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue.[108] The allegations sparked "fury" among some investors and led to the immediate filing of several lawsuits, one of them a class action suit claiming more than $2.5 billion in losses due to the IPO.[109] Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut.[110]