The first social media site SixDegrees.com was born in 1997. Then came AmIHotorNot.com, a website that allowed users to submit their photos so that others could rate their attractiveness, which is rumoured to have influenced the creation of Facebook and even Youtube and nurtured millions of insecurities.
How that happened was that in 2004, a boy named Mark Zuckerber, studying at Harvard University, created a website called Facemash. The website allowed users to compare the faces of people. The users could choose who was hot and who was not. Unsurprisingly this concept landed Mark in trouble as the administrators of Harvard seemed unimpressed.
Mark then created an online student directory TheFacebook. In January 2004, he started writing code for the website. Mark made the website for users to search for other Harvard students or find out who else was taking the classes they were in and look up friends of their friends.
On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched it as a website named TheFacebook.
He intended to create a website that could connect people around the university. Upon finishing the site, he told a couple of friends, one of whom suggested sharing it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which included several hundred people. According to his roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, they were actively watching the registration process, and within twenty-four hours, they had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants.
Just six days after the launch, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Mark of intentionally misleading them and stealing their idea. He convinced them he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com. Instead, he used their ideas to make a competing product.
The fight went on for four long years. And in the end, Zuckerberg paid them $65 million.
He also granted them Facebook shares as part of the settlement.
The membership for the website was initially limited to Harvard students only, but later around March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.
Looking at the amount of success Facebook achieved in such a short period, it is not shocking to know Facebook is the third most popular site in the world. It’s next only to Google and YouTube. Facebook is the number 1 social network in the world. It has 2.6 billion potential customers.
To celebrate the foundation of the social media giant Facebook, KarmaPlay is bringing to you a Social Media Quiz. Prep up and get ready to post your wins on your social feed!