Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Happy Birthday, Facebook!

Its hard to believe that the largest social networking site in the world has not even been around for a decade. Facebook, with well over 1 billion users turned 9 today. The website which had humble beginning for a closed user group within Harvard has grown manifolds in these years.

Facebook started of as Facemash, a website where Harvard students could rate each other on hotness quotient based on the uploaded photographs. Later Mark Zuckerberg relaunched Facemash as TheFacebook.com. In 2005, the site allowed users to upload their own photos. Till date, Facebook has seen more than 220 billion photos being uploaded. In 2006, Facebook expanded and allowed anyone over 13 to join the site and also introduced the News Feed. The Facebook like button was introduced much later in 2009 and according to the latest company figures, it has seen  1.13 trillion 'likes' since its introduction.

How Mark Zuckerberg took Facebook from an invite only Ivy League college website to this level is no secret, with popular culture featuring the story in movies and books like 'The Social Network' and 'Accidental Billionares'.

One thing that has remained constant over the nine years is change. Zuckerberg and Co. have made sure that great feature are added to the website on a regular basis. Be it the business pages or the relationship status or the social networking games or everything else in between.

  

Now, Facebook has taken to spreading its supremacy even on the mobile platforms. With the number of smartphone users growing everyday, the social networking giant is trying to make its mobile applications at par with its website. Shifting from HTML5 to building native apps from the scratch on both iOS and Android was a great move for the company.

Last year was a big one for the website as it became the first social networking site to go public with an IPO. Although, Facebook's shares have fluctuated heavily, Zuckerberg and Co. have managed to salvage the situation every single time. The company also went to buy the photo editing app Instagram.

Of course, controversies have played a huge part in this 8 year long journey. Nevertheless, the future looks bright for the birthday website. Facebook has taken 2013 head on with the introduction of Graph Search. It's small features such as these that make it different from the rest. Knowing Zuckerberg's penchant towards treading unknown paths, we're looking forward to Facebook surprising us with new features for many years to come.

Mark Zuckerberg Introducing Graph Search

If you liked the article, please take 5 second to share it!