A Harvard University sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook on February 4, 2004.
He makes that social media to connect Harvard students with one another. As the result, on the next day, over a thousand people signed up, and that was just the beginning.
Since that day, Facebook has rapidly grown to become one of the most significant social media companies in history. Facebook is one of the most valuable companies in the world, with more than 2 billion monthly active users.
In 2003, Zuckerberg became a college celebrity by creating FaceMash, a website where students can choose which women are most attractive at Harvard. However, this was quickly opposed by the administration and some women’s groups. Then, Zuckerberg considered the value of creating a campus-wide social network.
During his second year, Zuckerberg built the social media that was the forerunner of Facebook. When it launched on February 4, he and his roommates were glued to the screen in front of them, watching around 1,200 to 1,500 fellow students sign up for the site within the first 24 hours of being born.
From there, Facebook grew rapidly, moving to another university in the Boston area and another Ivy League campus in the spring. At the end of the year, the site had a million users. An investor, Peter Thiel invested 500 thousand US dollars. Dan Zuckerberg left Harvard to run Facebook from its new headquarters in California.
From California, Facebook spread all over the world, and become the social media site for a generation of internet users. Facebook is also one of the main forces bringing the internet into a very participatory phase.
In April 2019, Zuckerberg said he was overseeing plans to consolidate the power of social networks and control competitors by treating his user data as offering chips. He also publicly stated that he would protect that data.
According to him, about four thousand pages of company documents were leaked, most of which included data from 2011 to 2015. These documents include email, web, percentage data, and meeting summaries.
It shows how Zuckerberg, together with his board of directors and management team, found ways to make use of Facebook user data, including information about friends, relationships, and photos. According to an NBC News report, in some cases, Facebook will reward preferred companies by giving them access to their user data.
However, Facebook continues to dominate the social media market. So far Facebook generates the most ad revenue and maintains more than half of the total market share.
