Facebook marked 10 years since it went live
in a Harvard dorm room on February 4th, and its ambitious founder Mark Zuckerberg have managed to score quite a few
touchdowns.
In 2004, the Internet was a different place.
No YouTube, no Twitter, and fast-growing "Myspace" was just a year
old. But February 4, 2004 saw the
launch of the company that would go on to dominate the social web.
"The Facebook" started out as a
modest project put together by Zuckerberg and his friends Eduardo Saverin,
Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The site went live on Feb.
4, 2004 and spread around the Harvard campus like wild fire. By March of that
year, Zuckerberg
had extended Facebook's reach to Yale, Stanford and Columbia. Shortly
thereafter, all Ivy League schools, New York University, Boston University and
MIT were included. Before 2004 had reached its end, Facebook had 1 million
users. Now, 10 years later, Facebook is available worldwide and has some 1.2 billion active users.
After years of keeping Facebook a private
company, Zuckerberg decided to take the company public. In May
2012, Facebook had its IPO with stocks starting at $38. Initially, many
investors and pundits thought that Facebook wouldn't make any money as a public
company, but they were quickly proved wrong. Nearly two years later, Facebook
is alive and well. Along the way Facebook has been involved in a lengthy legal
fight between co-founders and embroiled in concerns over privacy, but Mr
Zuckerberg remains positive. "It's been an incredible journey so far, and
I'm so grateful to be a part of it," he said in a statement.
Among the growing challenges is the soaring
popularity of smartphone apps that let people share images, videos, thoughts or
observations at any moment. Social networking sites such as Pinterest, Twitter
and SnapChat have sparked concerns that Facebook which set a social networking
trend in motion may be losing its original teen base. A recent Princeton
University study suggested that Facebook may lose around 80 per cent of its
users over the next three years, a claim which was challenged by the social
networking site. According to a recent report in iStrategyLabs, Facebook lost
more than 3 million users in the age group of 13 and 17 between January 2011
and January 2014.