Facebook Origins
Facebook came into existence on February 4, 2004 as an internal friendship network for students of Harvard College. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg who is also a member of the 2006 class, never dreamt of the rapid expansion and the huge runaway success that his experiment at Harvard would roll into. The name was inspired from the custom of universities in USA to give their newly enrolled students a paper Facebook introducing people on the Campus to them.
Helping him with the website were his two friends, Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. The team was joined by Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz within two months of launching. In May 2004 the whole team moved to Alto (California) to concentrate on expansion strategies of the website. There more people joined in –Adam D'Agelo, Sean Parker, Divya Narendra, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. That same year Facebook accepted half a million dollars from Peter Thiel of PayPal fame and in May 2005 Accel Partners offered US $12.8 million as capital. By December 2005 Face book was boasting of a membership of one million people.
“The Facebook” which was first limited only to Harvard inmates spread within a short span of only two months to all Ivy League schools. From there, year 2005 saw Face book membership extended to all educational institutions or rather to everybody who had an email extension ending in ac.uk, .edu, and so on.
The year 2005 had more members adding up for the website and saw it buying its own domain name which did not include 'the' anymore. The new name was facebook.com as bought for US $200,000 from the Aboutface Corporation in May 2005. This is the time when the site went through intensive re-designing in order to make it more user-friendly and easily navigable. After the immense success with universities, the facebook.com allowed in high school networks which joined in rapid succession. Twenty-one universities from the UK had joined by December 2005 as well as all higher studies education institutions in Mexico, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
If counted, there would have been more than 30 thousand high schools and two thousand colleges from all over the globe as part of this amazingly popular website. As the website grew in popularity it attracted more investment and offers from the bigwigs in the industry. Peter Thiel and his partners (Meritech Capital Partners and Greylock Pertners) added US $25 million to the site in 2006 making it possible to have expanded to India including the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) both Ivy League schools in the country.
A master stroke followed with the inclusion of iTunes on Face book whereby members could download twenty-five samples of music free of cost. The promotion move paid off and Facebook.com continued to grow now in Europe, covering the Universities of Germany and Israel.
There was something that had the Facebook become a landslide success across the globe. When a study was done in September 2007 this was the website that had some 55 million active members – a number which had everybody take notice of this social network phenomenon. A run on the Alexa would tell you that today the Face book is counted as 7th in rank where it climbed from its 60th position in just one year.
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Girlfriend
You might be a redneck when you say ho-down and your girlfriend hits the ground.
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