Facebook turns five – from dorm room to Web phenomenon
By Dave Parrack
It feels like Facebook has been with us forever but it’s actually only five years old, and back then it was a part-time dorm room hobby by a wet-behind-the-ears Mark Zuckerberg. Today, it’s the biggest social networking site in the world, with 150 million active users from all corners of the globe.
In February, 2004, a young Mark Zuckerberg launched ‘The Facebook’ as a place for students to keep in touch and share photos with each other. The Web site was an instant success, with 1,200 Harvard students signing up and using the site in the first 24 hours it was live.
Within a year, the social network had been expanded to include other colleges and universities around the States. It’s estimated that 85 percent of students able to access the site had signed up across the network, making it an almost-unavoidable part of being a student.
High schoolers were then added to the list of people able to sign up, before the newly named Facebook was made available for free to anyone aged 13 or above. Now, in 2009, Facebook has 150 million members, 700 employees, and is estimated to have made around $300 million in 2008.
Zuckerberg celebrates Facebook’s fifth birthday in a blog post announcing that he site was giving away a free virtual gift to all its members as a way of saying thank you. He also talks about how as much as the first five years have brought expansion and change, so that process is going to continue for some time to come.
The big question for Facebook remains how to monetize the site in an efficient way without upsetting those millions of loyal users. But Zuckerberg has insisted he’s more interested in gaining traffic than making revenue at this point in the story.
Facebook has grown from a hobby to a Web phenomenon so quickly and without pause that the company hasn’t had the time or energy to figure out a sensible monetization strategy. One option is to change from being free to charging a subscription fee but for me, that is the most likely way to lose the majority of users.
Happy Birthday Facebook. Here’s to another five years on top.
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February 6th, 2009
February 2007, but that would make Facebook only 2 years old.
February 7th, 2009
Thanks mrseverdantgreen – an obvious mistake there which I’ve now fixed.