Images courtesy of Facebook
Today is the day that Facebook turns five. Yes, the world’s favourite social network has only been in our lives for five years. A pre-Facebook world is as much a distant memory as Shoreditch before Splendid came along.
On Facebook’s official blog, Mark Zuckerberg marks the milestone birthday with these words:
Tomorrow is Facebook’s 5th birthday. This is a happy occasion for Facebook, but much more significant to the Facebook team is the fact that over 150 million people around the world are using Facebook to connect with the people in their lives. Facebook was founded in 2004 to give people the tools to engage and understand the world around them. We are glad and humbled that so many people are using Facebook in this way.
While we at Facebook make products that enable people to share information efficiently, Facebook is mostly the product of the people who use it. Without you and the connections you make to others, the products we create wouldn’t have much meaning. So we feel fortunate to have all of you with us. To express our appreciation, we’ve created a “Thank You” gift, which will be available tomorrow in the Facebook Gift Shop for you to to give freely to others. In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook.
Since its founding, one of the constants of Facebook is that it has continuously evolved to make it easier to share. To give you a sense of how the site has changed, we dug up a few images of how Facebook used to look—you can see them here. Building and moving quickly for five years hasn’t been easy, and we aren’t finished. The challenge motivates us to keep innovating and pushing technical boundaries to produce better ways to share information.
The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn’t consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.
Why is it important to us to keep building better ways for people to share information? Enabling efficient sharing is important because it makes the world more open, and this gives everyone a voice to express ideas and initiate change.
As we celebrate Facebook’s 5th birthday, we continue to work hard to evolve Facebook and make it as simple as possible to communicate with and understand the people and entities that matter to you.
At the start of this year, Facebook declared to the world that it had reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. That’s crazy.
FAcebook founder Mark Zuckerberg aged 5
I remember when I turned 5…
- I had about ten good mates [Facebook speaks 35 different languages]
- I spoke three languages (English, Gujerati and Cookie Monster) [Facebook speaks 35 different languages]
- I had never been abroad (unless you count Wales) [Facebook is available in over 170 different countries and territories]
- I spent most of my freetime playing with lego [Today, globally more than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day]
- My mum took photos of me and my chums in Wimpy on her vintage Nikon 1970’s camera. The photos are stuck in my parents’ attic somewhere smelling of squirrel wee and dust [More than 850 million photos upload photos to Facebook each month]
- I was the third tallest boy in my class [If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria]
I have to say that Facebook has come a hell of a long way in five years and has changed the way in which we connect as individuals. I personally have used Facebook to catch up with old schoolfriends, seek employment, connect with colleagues (past and present), sell in PR stories to journalists, give our clients a space to grow a community, link up with like-minded people from across the world, support the plight of monks in Burma, upload and share my holiday photos and to organise invitation lists for parties (phew!).
The most impressive thing about Facebook is that my girlfriend’s 84 year old French grandmother has heard of it. Seriously - that’s what you call ubiquity.
Today I was reading an article which stated that the fastest growing demographic for Facebook is women over the age of fifty-five. That’s my mum’s demographic. Anything that can take people like my mum (highly suspicious of technology) and connect them online has to be a good thing, right?
The Facebook Company Timeline:
2008
April
Facebook launches Facebook Chat
Facebook releases Translation application to 21 additional languages
March
Facebook updates privacy controls to include Friend List privacy
Facebook launches in German
February
Facebook launches in Spanish and French
January
Facebook co-sponsors Presidential Debates with ABC News
2007
November
Facebook launches Facebook Ads
October
Facebook reaches over 50 million active users
Facebook launches Facebook Platform for Mobile
Facebook and Microsoft expand advertising deal to cover international markets; Microsoft takes a $240 million equity stake in Facebook
July
Facebook acquires startup Parakey
May
Facebook launches Marketplace application for classified listings
Facebook hosts F8 event to launch Facebook Platform
Facebook Platform launches with 65 developer partners and over 85 applications
April
Facebook reaches 20 million active users
Facebook updates site design and adds network portals
March
Facebook reaches over 2 million active Canadian users and 1 million active UK users
February
Virtual gift shop launches as a feature
2006
December
Facebook reaches more than 12 million active users
November
Share feature added on Facebook, simultaneously launched on over 20 partner sites
September
News Feed and Mini-Feed are introduced with additional privacy controls
Facebook expands registration so anyone can join
August
Facebook development platform launches
Notes application is introduced
Facebook and Microsoft form strategic relationship for banner ad syndication
May
Facebook expands to add work networks
April
Facebook raises $27.5 million from Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and others
Facebook Mobile feature launches
2005
December
Facebook reaches more than 5.5 million active users
October
Photos is added as an application
Facebook begins to add international school networks
September
Facebook expands to add high school networks
August
The company officially changes its name to Facebook from thefacebook.com
May
Facebook raises $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners;
Facebook grows to support more than 800 college networks
2004
December
Facebook reaches nearly 1 million active users
September
Groups application is added; the Wall is added as a Profile feature
June
Facebook moves its base of operations to Palo Alto, Calif.
March
Facebook expands from Harvard to Stanford, Columbia and Yale
February
Mark Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm room
Happy birthday Facebook!
(you can find us on Facebook here)
Further reading:
Mashable: Facebook Turns 5; You Get Free Gifts
Pocket-Lint: Five Facebook facts for its 5th birthday
TechCrunch: On The Eve Of Its Fifth Birthday, A Facebook Design Retrospective
Comment time…
I’ve got three questions for you:
- How has Facebook changed the way in which you connect to the world around you?
- What will Facebook look like in five years’ time?
- What will Twitter look like on its fifth birthday?
(Answers below please)
Rax Lakhani
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