The History of Facebook

I've spent the past couple of weeks getting up to speed on Facebook. I thought it would be helpful to get some background on how FB got started. I could not find anything on the website itself, so have looked elsewhere. Here are some links you may find of interest if you are also interested in this popular social networking tool:

• Facebook - The Complete Biography
  by Sid Yadav, Mashable: Social Networking News, August 25, 2006.
  written when Facebook was still exclusively the domain of students and not open to the general public. Still, this seems to be the most referred-to history.


• Wikipedia entry for Facebook
  would the list be complete without it?


• MSNBC interview with Mark Zukerberg, creator of Facebook June 4, 2007.


• Oh Canada...
  by Nico Vera, The Facebook Blog, May 17, 2007
  talks about the dramatic growth of Canadian Facebook users, notably in Toronto.

From the Mashable article:

Originally called thefacebook, Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students - Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes - to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time. In August 2005, thefacebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

From the Wikipedia entry:

On September 11, 2006, Facebook became open to all users of the Internet, prompting protest from its existing user base. Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address.

From the MSNBC interview with Zukerberg:

Number of users is doubling every 6 months; currently they have over 25 million active users. He also states at the end of the interview that he has not yet made any money from Facebook.