THE BIRTH OF FACEBOOK

The social network created by Zuckerberg

On February 4, 2004, Facebook was officially born , the most famous and used social network in the world today. The platform offers a messaging system ( Messenger ), a video platform ( Facebook Watch ) and many other services designed to connect millions of people every day. Its market value is around 500 million and it boasts well over 2.2 billion active users, but what is the real story of this social network ?

Mark Zuckerberg: the inventor of Facebook

• Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1984 and already as a child showed an unbridled passion for IT and programming.
• At just 12 years old he used Atari Basic  to create  ” ZuckNet “ , a sort of messenger that allowed messages to be transferred between networks of computers connected to each other. The program is used to communicate by the father in the dentist’s office and by the Zuckerberg family themselves at home.
• Mark’s parents decide to hire a tutor to help him develop his passion through private lessons, then encourage him to take graduate courses at nearby Mercy College.
• In high school he became captain of the fencing team and showed an inclination towards the study of literature and classics, but his interest in the world of programming and software development grew more and more and he continued to work on the development of new programs.
• During high school he created Synapse,  a media player for MP3 playlists that studies each user’s preferences. This arouses great interest in giants such as Microsoft  and  AOL who say they are interested in purchasing the program and hiring Mark even if he does not have a degree but the boy refuses and continues his studies.
• After graduating he decided to attend Harvard University, where he first developed Facemash and later Facebook.
• He subsequently left his studies and together with Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Sean Parker and Adam D’Angelo founded Facebook  Inc.

When was Facebook born?

It all started on October 28, 2003, when 19-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg started Facemash . The idea was to create a site where all the photos of college students could be uploaded and to do so it was necessary to enter protected areas of the university network. Facemash recorded 22,000 photo views and more than 450 visitors in the first few hours, and the data overload crashed the university’s servers . The site was then closed and Mark was accused of violating security, copyright and individual privacy, resulting in a 6-month suspension.

After these events the real history of Facebook begins. Launched on February 4, 2004, the new website registered with the domain thefacebook.com was programmed by Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum and managed by Eduardo Saverin at the corporate level. A few days after the birth of Facebook Divya Narendra and the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – three other Harvard students – accused Mark of fraud and filed a lawsuit that cost 65 million dollars. The accusation was that Mark had promised them help in developing a social networking service, “HarvardConnection.com,” with the intent of stealing the idea from them and creating a competing site.

Thanks also to the help of Dustin Moskovitz for the graphics and Chris Hughes for the promotion of the site, in March half the population of Harvard was already registered for the service. TheFacebook later expanded to Stanford University, Columbia University and Yale University. In April the service expanded to the rest of the Ivy League, MIT, Boston University and Boston College, and subsequently spread to other institutions in the United States and Canada.

Facebook Inc

Towards the middle of 2004, Facebook Inc was born , a corporation that allowed them to better manage (from a financial point of view) the great success achieved by their idea throughout North America. This had as president the entrepreneur and co-founder of Napster Sean Parker, Zuckerberg’s informal advisor. In June the site’s founders, along with Adam D’Angelo and Parker, moved to a house near Stanford University in Palo Alto.

The first investor was Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, who acquired 10.2% of the company shares with an investment of half a million dollars. Facebook’s shares, however, rose quickly and when Microsoft decided to invest in the social network, in October 2007, it had to spend 240 million dollars to acquire just 1.6%.

In the period between April and August 2005, the current domain was registered for the sum of 200,000 dollars: facebook.com . As time went by, anyone in possession of an email address with a university domain had the opportunity to become a user. On 27 February 2006 the service also became open to high schools and large companies . Finally, on September 26, 2006, Facebook was extended to anyone over the age of 13 .

The growth rates know no stop: the number of users continues to rise, as does the value of revenues. In 2009, just five years after its creation, the company’s balance sheet closed in the black , proving that Mark Zuckerberg had a profitable and profitable idea.

The birth of Facebook in Italy and its development

When was Facebook born in Italy? The birth of Facebook in Italy took place on May 14, 2008, when the site was prepared for the Italian language. In August of the same year, Zuckerberg’s platform had more than one million three hundred thousand visits , achieving an annual increase of 961%. Furthermore, during the third quarter of 2008, Italy was the first country with the greatest increase in users, reaching a registration rate of 135%.

In October 2010, according to data provided by Facebook and collected in the Facebook Observatory, there were 17.3 million Italians who have a Facebook account .

At the end of 2011 the number of Italian users was more than 21 million, of which 13 million access the platform every day and of these more than half connect from mobile (7.5 million).

In May 2017, the latest measurement recorded more than 30 million active users per month of which 24 million connect daily .

The success

From September 2006 to September 2007 the site’s traffic ranking went from 67th to 7th position . Since July 2007 it has been in the ranking of the 10 most visited sites in the world and is the number one site in the United States for photos viewed, uploading over 60 million images every week.

On Facebook, traffic grew at a rapid pace, until March 2010, when it surpassed the search engine Google for number of visits in the United States for a week. On August 24, 2015, the platform reached the record figure of 1 billion users simultaneously active on the platform.

On July 24, 2018, Facebook announced the first decline in active users in Europe in years, as well as a sharp slowdown in growth globally (approximately +10% in daily active users compared to the second quarter of 2017). Facebook attributed this sharp decline to the new EU privacy regulation, which came into force on May 25th.

Weakening profits and uncertainty about future growth sent Facebook shares down nearly 20% in one day, the biggest fall in absolute terms in US stock market history.

In addition to Facebook  

• At just 26 years old, in 2010 Zuckerberg was considered the youngest billionaire on the planet by Forbes and was the personality of the year 2010 according to TIME’s magazine with the merit of having created a social network with an enormous impact on the planet;
• In 2012 he married his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, they had 2 children and live in Palo Alto, California;
• He and his wife are promoters of various charitable activities, in particular through the “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative”, their company which aims to invest in philanthropic causes ;
• In 2010 they donated $100 million to save the Newark Public Schools system in New Jersey;
• In December of the same year Mark signed the “ Giving Pledge ” taking on the responsibility to donate at least 50% of his assets to charitable acts throughout his life;
• Upon the birth of their first child, he and his wife Priscilla decided to write a letter in which they committed to donating the value of 99% of their Facebook shares (at the time approximately 45 billion dollars) to charity, committing them to the ” Chan Zuckerberg Initiative “;
• In 2016 they announced that CZI would invest $3 billion in scientific research over the next 10 years for the treatment and prevention of diseases. And they created the “Chan Zuckerberg Biohub”, an independent research center based in San Francisco headed by the renowned neuroscientist Cori Bargmann of The Rockefeller University.

The acquisitions

From 2007 until today, Facebook has acquired a number of companies which have allowed it to launch various services. Facebook’s main acquisitions are:

• Parakey: Acquired in 2007, it was the owner of a patent for the easy transfer of images and text from mobile devices to the web;
• Friendfeed : Acquired in 2009, it was a real-time updates aggregator, acquired for $15 million in cash and $32.5 million in stock, this is where the Like button comes from;
• Snaptu : In 2011 Facebook decided to become a giant in the mobile sector, Facebook Mobile was born and a series of acquisitions began to improve the browsing experience on Facebook from mobile. Along with Snaptu also comes Beluga, which, with its messaging system, has become an integral part of the Facebook Messenger App. Also in 2011, Push Pop Press (a company specializing in digital bookmarking) and Gowalla (one of FourSquare’s main competitors) were also acquired. for geo-localization);
• Rel8tion : Seattle start-up that deals with advertising targeting ;
• Face.com : Israeli company that deals with facial recognition software;
• Instagram : Free mobile application and photographic social network that allows you to take photos and share them on other social networks;
• Whatsapp : The most famous multi-platform messaging app that allows you to send messages, photos, videos, documents and voice recordings to other users via the internet using your mobile number (acquired for 15 billion dollars of which 4 paid in cash and 12 via Facebook actions);
• Glancee : App for smartphones that allows you to find people who are nearby and have interests in common with ours;
• Storylane : Company specializing in storytelling ;
• Oculus headsets .

Facebook nowadays

Today Facebook has over  2 billion monthly active users and if you also count the subscribers of Whatsapp , Messenger and Instagram the number reaches more than 5 billion. More than 15 years after the birth of Facebook, Zuckerberg’s challenge is to ensure that his web community is protected from the hatred and abuse that has become rampant in recent years both in the real world and on the web.

Zuckerberg also intends to find a way to limit all the improper uses of the platform that are still possible today. Managing to develop new and better methods to defend registered users from possible violent communications and possible government interference is the mission of 2018.

According to the founder of the most important social network, in fact, technology must unite and give power to people, not make them slaves and controlled. At the end of this new year we will know that he has once again managed to complete his intentions!

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