The History of the Facebook Phenomenon

The Facebook website was developed by Mark Zuckerberg who was a Harvard University sophomore at the time in 2004. He originally called the site thefacebook. The name Facebook was derived after college publications that are distributed to students in the beginning of the year, the purpose of them is to allow students to get to know one another better. In the beginning Facebook was only used by Harvard students as a type of meet and greet on the internet. It allowed the students to stay in touch with each other and learn more about one another. Facebook gained such a high level of popularity that it was soon made available to other colleges besides Harvard like Stanford and Yale. Mark Zuckerberg had help from two fellow classmates to expand Facebook; their names are Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. As its popularity continued to grow so did its availability. Before long High School students had access to it and then anyone who used the Internet as long as they were at least 13 years old.

Throughout Facebook's history many offers have been made to either invest in the site or to buy the site from Mark Zuckerberg who has let it be known that it is not nor never will be for sale. Microsoft and PayPal are two companies who have invested a large amount of money in order to own shares of this company. Not only have companies invested for shares of Facebook so have self made millionaires such as Li Ka-Shing of Hong Kong. Facebook has a long history of providing its users with free usage of the site due to other companies paying for advertisement space.

Facebook's history has not always been a pleasant one, when it first got started it was subject to a huge lawsuit that was initiated by ConnectU. ConnectU is a networking system who was also created within the campus of Harvard. The creators of ConnectU made allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole information like their source codes while he was their employee. In the end Mark Zuckerberg insisted that he was innocent of the charges and the lawsuit were dismissed. Free and clear of allegations of being a thief Facebook as grown by leaps and bounds and is not showing signs of slowing down anytime soon. Besides being subject to a lawsuit they have also been subject to concerns regarding their privacy policies. For the most part Facebook has had a great history and can look forward to an even better future.