Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin.[1] The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League,[2] and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States,[3][4] corporations,[5] and by September 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.[6][7]
In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began writing the code for a new website, known as 'theFacebook. He said in an article in The Harvard Crimson that he was inspired to make Facebook from the incident of Facemash: "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available ... the benefits are many."[9] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[18] He told The Crimson, "Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard. I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it as I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."[19] Zuckerberg also stated his intention to create a universal website that can connect people around the university. According to his roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, "When Mark finished the site, he told a couple of friends ... then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which was ... three hundred people." Moskovitz continued to say that, “By the end of the night, we were ... actively watching the registration process. Within twenty-four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants."[20]
Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product.[21] The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of theCrimson members have ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.[21][22] U Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard University. Within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.[23] Zuckerberg was soon joined in the promotion of the site by Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, andYale.[2] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston-area schools. It gradually reached most universities in Canada and the United States.[24][25][26] Facebook was incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.[27] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[2] The company dropped ‘The’ from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[28]
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