Facebook

Facebook is one of the biggest social networking sites to date. It was created by Mark Zuckerberg, who was a student at Harvard college at the time, along with his roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website was first launched on the 4th February 2004. Originally, Facebook memberships were limited to students at Harvard, with over half of the students joining within the first month of the website’s launch, and then the members expanded to other colleges in the area. As the website grew, it gave support to students at different universities, and then it expanded to include high school students too. Since 2006, anyone who is over the age of 13 and has a valid email address is able to have a Facebook membership.

With a Facebook account, the user creates a user profile, can add other users as friends, have message conversations with other users, write status updates and post pictures and videos, play lots of different games, like and comment on others’ posts and get notifications if others do the same. The website had become increasingly more popular, with over 1 billion monthly users in 2015.

The idea for Facebook was an adaptation of another website that Zuckerberg had created in 2003, called Facemash. The website displayed pictures of two students at Harvard, asking the person visiting the website which of them was more attractive. In order to gain access to these photographs, Zuckerberg had to hack into the private areas of the computer network at the college. Due to this, the website was shut down within a few days of its launch.

In June 2004, soon after moving the operations base to Palo Alto in California, Facebook received its first investment from the co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. Then in May 2005, another investment was made by Accel, investing over $12 million in the company, and Jim Breyer, a partner in Accel, also invested $1 million of his own money into the website.

By the end of 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages, which were used to promote the businesses and attract customers. Due to the large number of these business pages, Facebook came up with company pages, a new concept which started to be used in May 2009. Microsoft bought a share of Facebook in 2007, purchasing 1.6% of the company for $240 million. Due to these numbers, it was implied that the company had a value of around $15 billion at that time.

In July 2010, it was announced that Facebook had half a billion users, which officially made it the biggest social network in the world at the time. The data that the company had revealed that half od the members on the website used it daily for an average of just over half an hour each day, and around 150 million users accessed the website using a smartphone. The milestone was called a “quiet revolution”. Facebook had a value of over $40 billion in November 2010, passing eBay and becoming the third biggest American Web company. The next year, it was revealed that the company removed around 20,000 profiles each day to try and boost the cyber security of the site, for violations including spam and underage use of the website. Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the website had over 1 billion monthly users in October 2012.

Today, there are 3 million posts and 150,000 messages sent every minute on Facebook. 350 million photos are uploaded each day, and over 30% of the population of America have a Facebook account. All together, the users of Facebook spend 927 million hours a month playing the games on Facebook. Around 600,000 hacking attempts are made each day. The large amount of photos and videos that are uploaded to Facebook via mobile take up 27% of upstream web traffic.

I think that Facebook is an inspiring company, because it has been created by college students and they never intended for the website to grow the way it does. For this reason, I would really like to visit. I think it would be interesting to see how their company works  at the offices in California, and I also realise that the opportunity to visit is not one that is given to the public, and so I would feel extremely lucky to be able to go. To be able to see how one of the biggest companies is run would be a very unique experience that I would find extremely memorable and informative. The fact that the website began as a support system for college students, and the site now has over 1 billion users, shows that anything can happen to a business if the idea is good enough.