Facebook: Platform started for amusement, yet became the largest social media across globe

Facebook, the biggest social media platform began its journey full of adventure, curiosity and excitement. Facebook has given a virtual form to society. Today, more than 2.8 billion active users worldwide use Facebook.

In 2004, a group of friends at college created an innovative new social media platform with the aim of connecting Harvard students through an online community.

WhatsApp and Instagram, both these big social media giants also come under this platform.

In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was a second-year student at Harvard University. Mark hacked Harvard Student’s directory server and created a new site called Facemass by collecting all the profiles in it. He copied the student ID images used by the dormitories and used them to populate his new website. Website visitors could use Zuckerberg’s site to compare two student photos side-by-side and determine who was “hot” and who was “not.”

Facemash opened on October 28, 2003 was closed a few days later, after it was shut down by Harvard execs. In the aftermath, Zuckerberg faced serious charges of breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy.

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched a new website called TheFacebook. Soon after Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra of having stolen the idea from them. The claimants later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, however, the matter was eventually settled out of court in 2008 for $65 million in cash and Facebook stock.

The company changed the site’s name from TheFacebook to just Facebook after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005.

By 2009, it had become the world’s most used social networking service, according to a report by the analytics site Compete.com.

As we all know today, Facebook exploded beyond all expectations for Zuckerberg and other Founders. Now millions of people were connecting with Facebook. In such a situation, many big companies partnered with him to promote his business, due to which Facebook benefited in a big way.

Today, the social media giant has a market capitalization of more than $600 Billion,and had annual revenue of around$70.7 Billion in 2019. It has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and has made Zuckerberg one of the young billionaries in the world.

Recently Facebook has changed its name to Meta. The company’s ambition is to make its platform a metaverse in the future. Metaverse is a term that refers to the next stage of development of the Internet, in which reality will be given a new form. Due to this people will be able to do social and business engagement with each other virtually.

In 2010, he signed a pledge, along with other wealthy businessmen, to donate at least half of his wealth to charity. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have donated $25 million toward fighting the Ebola virus and announced that they would contribute 99% of their Facebook shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.