Posted
on February 4, 2016
Love
it or hate it, you've almost certainly heard of Facebook.
It's
the Number 1 social media networking site, with almost four times as
many users as Number 2 (Twitter).
And
it's 12 years old today!
Founder
Mark Zuckerberg famously started the website while he was a student
at Harvard University. Harvard students live in one of 12 residential
houses, each with some 350 to 500 students, each with its own dining
hall, common rooms, and other facilities. Many of the houses offered
paper “Facebooks” to their members; these were directories with
each house member's photo, name, and a bit of info. Zuckerberg used
the photos from nine houses' Facebooks to make a “who's hotter?”
online game that became immediately successful but was shut down
almost as immediately by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was
almost expelled, but he was inspired to go on with his project of
making an online social network. He launched it on this date in 2004,
under the name “Thefacebook,” located at thefacebook.com.
Zuckerberg
was sued by other students who complained that he had tricked them—he
had promised to help them build a Harvard social network, but (they
said) instead he used their ideas to create a competing social
network. They finally settled their lawsuit several years later for a
hefty amount of shares in Facebook! Cha-ching!
Thefacebook
was restricted to only students of Harvard, but after a month
Zuckerberg and his business partners expanded to other Ivy League
universities. Gradually, they widened the circle to more and more
universities...then high school students...then anybody in the world
who was at least 13 years old (or willing to lie about their age).
Almost
two billion people in the world now use Facebook! Only about three
billion people in the world use the internet at all, so that's a
pretty good percentage of all web-surfers!
 |
| Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has probably had a Facebook profile a lot longer than President Obama, who only got his own FB profile in November of 2015! |
The
company is now worth more than 44 billion dollars!! And it employs
more than 11 thousand people. Hmm...how is that possible, when we all
use it for free?
Of
course, there are many people, including people who actually use
Facebook, who criticize aspects of the company, and/or aspects of
social media at all! Here
is a YouTube criticism that seems really apt!
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