In 2004, the internet landscape was evolving, with broadband taking over dial-up connections. Mobile phones with color screens were becoming a norm. It was on February 4 of that year that a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates introduced a social network called TheFacebook at Harvard University.
The name "Facebook" was inspired by the university's student directory, known as Facebook, distributed at the beginning of each academic year. What started as a localized platform quickly gained momentum, eventually evolving into the world's largest social media network, boasting over three billion monthly active users today.
Zuckerberg's inspiration for Facebook stemmed from his earlier project, the Facemash website. This project involved ranking female students at Harvard using their photos without permission. Zuckerberg had hacked the university's security system to collect student ID photos, leading to the platform's swift shutdown and disciplinary actions against him.
Undeterred, Zuckerberg and his roommates launched a new networking site a few months later, allowing Harvard students to connect with each other using their dot.edu email addresses. The popularity of this social network spread rapidly across other U.S. college campuses.
Within the first year, the platform amassed one million users. In August 2005, it was rebranded as Facebook.com. By the end of 2006, the age restriction lowered, allowing anyone above 13 to join. The user base surged to 50 million from 2006 to 2007 and doubled to 100 million by the end of 2008.
In 2012, Facebook achieved the monumental milestone of one billion users, valued at $104 billion. The share price at that time was $38 per share. As of last Friday, each share was priced at approximately $474, marking a more than twelvefold increase from its initial offering.
On October 29, 2021, Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook's parent company as Meta Platforms, Inc., encompassing Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and other products and services.
Facebook, with three billion monthly active users, is now the world's foremost social media platform. It is utilized by over half of the global internet users and more than a third of the world's population.
To put it in perspective, the number of Facebook users surpasses the entire populations of India (1.4 billion), China (1.4 billion), and Bangladesh (173 million). India leads in the number of Facebook users in 2023 with 385.6 million, followed by the United States with 188.6 million, and then Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico.