4 February 2004 - Facebook launch

Facebook was founded on the 4th of February, 2004, as “The facebook” by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, following the high popularity of Facemash. In 2003, these four Harvard students created Facemash, an online service to judge and rate how attractive their fellow students were. The pictures received 22,000 votes from 450 students. However, since this was in violation of the university rules, Facemash was shut down after just two days. Zuckerberg, however, noticed how well-received and popular Facemash was and registered the domain name: thefacebook.com. In February 2012, Facebook filed to become a public company, raising $16 billion in May - the largest Initial Public Offering (IPO) for any internet company till then.

What started as a Harvard social networking website is now the biggest global internet phenomenon today. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users, it is the leading social media platform. However, today, Facebook has transitioned beyond just a place for people to share their lives with their friends. It is an entire ecosystem offering opportunities to thrive in multiple facets of life - business, entertainment, politics, journalism, communication, etc. In fact, this tech giant has grown to the point where it owns a few of the most popular social media networks available to us - WhatsApp and Instagram, for instance.

Over the years, among the challenges that Facebook had to constantly battle, privacy and misinformation remain significant problems. Users have been sceptical of the confidentiality of their data and concerned over the veracity of the information they consume. That being said, it is undeniable that Facebook has forever altered computing and technology. It has been a driving force in open source for many years and shared its innovative hardware and software tools with the broader community. It has, furthermore, given birth to Big Data (in the form of Cassandra database), created millions of jobs, became a major platform for political parties to contest elections, helped organise revolutions, and decided what news is. To put it simply, we have not seen a bigger and more powerful internet phenomenon in our times than Facebook.