How Did Facebook Originate

To answer the question, "How Did Facebook Originate" one doesn’t have to look that far back in history. Although the social networking site has more than 200 million active users worldwide, it only sprang into existence in 2003. In the past several years it has gained popularity in college circles, and is now used by people of every age.

Since Facebook is the most dominant social networking site, many people wonder how did Facebook originate? The very first incarnation of Facebook was at Harvard University.

Mark Zuckerberg, a sophmore at the time, created the site Facemash in October of 2003. He created a version of the popular site Hot or Not exclusively for Harvard students.

Like Hot or Not, Facemash would show the user two pictures of people (normally young women) and ask the user to rate who was more attractive. In the case of Facemash, the young women displayed were members of Harvard’s nine houses.

In order to get the site to work, Zuckerberg had to hack into Harvard’s private network and grab photos from each house’s dormitory ID pictures. Within a few days, the site was shut down by the Harvard administration. Understandably, Zuckerberg was charged with a breach of security, and was set to be expelled. The charges were eventually dropped, and he was allowed to stay at Harvard.

In February 2004, Zuckerberg used his knowledge from his last project to create "The Facebook." Many universities offer their students face books that help students recognize one another by name. The books include pictures of all the students with their name. Zuckerberg updated the idea for the 21st century with the creation of this website.

Within the first 30 days of the site's creation, over half of the undergraduates at Harvard were members of The Facebook, located at http://www.thefacebook.com. Due to the popularity of the site, Zuckerberg brought on Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum to help further develop and promote the site.

In March of 2004, the site expanded to three more universities: Stanford, Columbia and Yale. Throughout the spring of that year, the site grew to serve the rest of the Ivy League schools and most Boston area schools.

Up until June of 2004, Facebook was officially called "The Facebook." The base of operations moved from Boston to Palo Alto, California. The following year The Facebook officially became Facebook. The company purchased the domain name www.facebook.com for $200,000.

The next step was to open up Facebook to all high school students. The population of the site's user base grew even larger as younger students were allowed to join the site. Although the rival social networking site MySpace had become very popular with teens, just as many within this age group were interested in being part of Facebook.

Finally, Facebook opened up to anyone over the age of 13. This opened the doors for other types of social connections. Moms groups, activist groups, political groups, marketing groups and fan groups were able to join together on Facebook.

Facebook allows people to network with others based on many different criteria. Users can join networks based on the city they live in, their workplace, their school and their region. Facebook helps people connect by suggesting friends who are in the same networks. These applications help people grow friends lists fast, and may be part of the reason why Facebook has become so popular.

In April of 2008, Facebook outranked MySpace by total number of visitors for the first time. Facebook had 123.9 million unique visitors, and MySpace had 114.6 unique visitors. Although the two sites were started within a year of each other, the restricted membership of Facebook is partially to blame for its slow build toward dominance.

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