Facebook/Shutterstock
20 years ago this week, college boy Mark Zuckerberg pressed a key, and the Facebook.com website went live.
What started as a project of a few students at Harvard with completely different intentions, became two decades later a monster with billions of users, the ability to overthrow regimes, debates in Congress, and there are those who see Facebook, the largest social network in the world and its ilk, as a significant threat to Western democracies themselves.
What happened in between?
Here is the full history of the company, which has gone through many upheavals in the 20 years it has been in existence.
Beauty rating
The psychology student (how ironic or how not coincidental) at Harvard Mark Zuckerberg, and his friends Eduardo Severin, Dustin Moscovitch and Chris Hughes, in general wanted to establish a website that would allow students to rate the degree of attractiveness of their male and female classmates, back in 2003 and Zuckerberg did establish and write such a website , called facemash.
But even then, perhaps as a sign of things to come - he got into trouble with violating the university's rules because he used its resources and the site was taken down within two days, not before 450 people had signed up to it and rated it no less than 22,000 times.
The principle by the way, which was contrary to the spirit of the Internet at that time and in general, is the insistence that people register with their real name, and not hide behind an anonymous profile.
The website thefacebook.com, year 2004/official website, screenshot
The success of the small project led Zuckerberg to purchase thefacebook.com in January 2004, and launched what would become synonymous with the social network in February 2004. Harvard students who registered on the site could upload photos of themselves, and personal information such as their schedule, and which fraternity And social clubs are belonging or belonging.
The service gained momentum quickly, and then students from other ivy league universities, such as Stanford and Yale, were also allowed to join - and within four months, about a quarter of a million students from 34 universities were already registered on the site, and with the meteoric success the money came quickly: the MasterCard company began to pay for the privilege Advertise on the site, PayPal's Peter Thiel invests half a million dollars in the new company, and Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, joins the company as president.
In September of that year, "Facebook" as it was still called then, introduced "the wall" in user profiles, which allowed their friends to post things on their page, which became a central component of the new social network.
At the end of 2004, Facebook already had a million active users.
However, Facebook still lagged behind MySpace.com, which was the dominant social network at the time, with five million users.
But all that was about to change, and quickly.
In September, she presented "the wall" in the user profiles/ShutterStock
the first years
2005 was a turning point for Facebook.
She dropped the the from her name, and became facebook, and introduced the idea of tagging people in photos.
With the help of tags, people could identify themselves and others in photos, and in the same year Facebook was also opened to high school and university students outside the United States.
At the end of its second year of existence, Facebook already had six million active monthly users.
In 2006, the year YouTube and Twitter were founded, Facebook finally opened its doors to anyone over the age of 13. As Zuckerberg predicted, it was a treasure for advertisers—the ability to directly interact with a huge consumer base in one place.
To illustrate, the consumer products giant Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 consumers from Facebook to purchase a new teeth whitening product.
In 2006, Facebook finally opened its doors to anyone over the age of 13/ShutterStock
Privacy has been an issue at Facebook since the early years: when it introduced the news stream, Facebook posted any changes on the "wall" to all of the user's friends.
Following an outcry from users, the company was forced to introduce privacy controls for the first time, which allowed users to control what appeared in their news feed, instead of the default of everything visible to everyone.
In 2008, just four years after its official foundation, Facebook had already become the most popular social network in the world, surpassing MySpace.
The company also introduced live updates, trying to address its younger competitor Twitter.
2008 was also the year when politicians realized the power inherent in the social network, when more than a thousand Facebook groups were opened in support of the two presidential candidates at the time, Barack Obama and John McCain.
In Colombia Facebook was used by hundreds of thousands to protest against the guerrilla organization FARC, and in Egypt protests were organized on Facebook against the increase in bread prices, which would later become the "Arab Spring".
Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook/Reuters
Back in 2008, Facebook reached a settlement with ConnectU, another company started at Harvard, by the Winklevoss brothers, who claimed that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them.
This battle would continue throughout Facebook's young years, because the settlement was just the opening shot of a long legal battle that would last for years.
The Winklevoss brothers would finally lose him.
In 2009, three years after it introduced the interface to third-party developers, independent developers had already generated half a billion dollars in income for themselves by various developments for Facebook (among the most famous is Zynga, the developer of the game Farm Will), and Facebook itself cut a coupon from these revenues by Taking a percentage of the profits.
In 2011, about 12 percent of Facebook's revenue came from Zynga, for example.
In 2012, Facebook turned to a public offering, and raised no less than 16 billion dollars, according to a value of 102 billion dollars.
For comparison, when Google was first issued in 2004, it raised a little less than two billion dollars...
Another important change that Facebook makes in 2011 is to present the timeline, the time line that unites several sources of information into one stream, and in fact kills the "wall" that Facebook was built on originally.
Another important change that Facebook makes in 2011 is to introduce the timeline/ShutterStock
Don't fight them, own them
In 2012, based on the successful IPO, Facebook begins a wave of acquisitions, which becomes a real modus operandi: acquisition of competitors, or companies that provide successful complementary products to the Facebook aircraft carrier.
In April, Facebook acquires the photo sharing network Instagram, for one billion dollars.
This is one of its most important acquisitions and its future growth, since the purchase of Instagram allows it to face younger and brazen competitors that emerged later, such as Snapchat.
Instagram, one of Facebook/ShutterStock's most important acquisitions
Back in 2012 - Mark Zuckerberg gets married the day after the IPO, the stock experiences a drop and on the achievements side: Facebook crosses the line of one billion users.
In the following years, 2013 and 2014, Facebook experienced accelerated growth, returning to its original IPO value, along with warnings for the future: the company launches the search tool "Graph" which once again brings to the agenda the enormous amount of information that Facebook collects on each of us.
Keep this detail in mind, it will come back.
In 2013, there are reports that Facebook offered to acquire what would become one of its fiercest competitors, Snapchat, for three billion dollars, but Evan Spiegel, the company's CEO, refused. In February 2014, Facebook bought the instant messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion By the time the deal is signed, its value climbs to $22 billion - simply because of the increase in the value of Facebook shares...
In 2013, there are reports that Facebook offered to acquire what would become one of its fiercest competitors, Snapchat/ShutterStock
Back in 2014, Zuckerberg bet big on what he believed would become the technology of tomorrow - virtual reality.
Facebook buys up-and-coming virtual reality hardware company Oculus for $2 billion.
The Oculus helmet goes on the market two years later, but also cuts and the departure of founder Palmer Lackey.
This is also the year that Facebook bets on video, and convinces entities such as BuzzFeed and the New York Times to create live video for the network's player, and in general, causes media entities to invest large resources in video.
Facebook will later "reward" them by abusing them and fatally harming the news bodies, including blocking references to external websites.
Bet big - and succeeded: the Quest 3, Meta's virtual reality helmet./Reuters
The Great Scandal: Cambridge Analytica
2016 is an election year in the United States.
Conservative figures are accusing Facebook of content censorship and being "leftist", but this accusation is only going to be the opening shot for much more serious political scandals that Facebook will be involved in over its head.
These will also be the years when the enormous power that Facebook has to influence the vote of the voter and tilt the results of elections in Western democracies will become apparent.
Following the claims, and Trump's surprising victory, Zuckerberg embarked on a "listening tour" all over the United States in 2017, which sparked rumors of his running for president, which, in the meantime, turned out to be false.
In September of that year, the British Guardian publishes an article accusing Facebook of enabling ethnic cleansing and genocide in Myanmar, when it labeled a protest organization of the Rohingya minority as a "dangerous organization."
But this was only the first dose of the great political entanglement: the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
At the beginning of 2018, details began to emerge that a British company called "Cambridge Analytica", which specializes in political campaigns and worked for Trump's headquarters in the 2016 election campaign, obtained information on 87 million users from Facebook, and used the information to create a psychological profile for each of them and tailor a message to them. his choice in the desired direction.
The fact that information from Facebook was used by a body and a political candidate to influence the election results ignites a storm in the United States (Steve Bannon, one of Trump's top men, was one of the founders of Cambridge Analytica, and rumor has it that he invented the name).
Zuckerberg was summoned almost immediately to testify on the Hill - in the US Congress.
From the Netflix docu: "Privacy and Politics: The Cambridge Analytica Affair"
He is testifying before a joint committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives, regarding a series of scandals involving the intentional and invasive use of personal information on Facebook and was asked what the company did to prevent this.
He manages to avoid real answers, but the lawmakers warn him that action on the matter will come.
To add more fuel to the fire, in June it is also revealed that Facebook gave almost free access to technology companies and smartphone manufacturers to its information, as part of "special agreements".
Sheryl Sunberg testifies in September before the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the interference of foreign entities in the 2016 election. Facebook also announces that it was hacked and information of 30 million users was stolen.
Following the scandals, the founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, are leaving the company, along with the general counsel, the director of communications, the chief security officer, the director of news services, the vice president of partnerships and the founder of WhatsApp - all are leaving.
Zuckerberg testifies before a joint committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives/GettyImages
From Facebook to Meta
In 2021, amid the koruna epidemic, Facebook is trying to sweep the dirt under the carpet, pour some color and broadcast a new image - and changes the company's name to meta, which is intended to broadcast the new and brighter future (and without the mud) of the company, in the form of the meta universe, a virtual universe According to Zuckerberg's vision where we will all live and work with virtual reality helmets, from Meta of course.
In 2021 wants to create a new image - and changes the company's name to Meta/GettyImages
Meta, like other technology giants, is established in the structure of a super company, which unites all the company's arms under it: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In Zuckerberg's vision, the Metaverse is supposed to be the heir to the era of mobile computing in which we are (everyone with smartphones), but this vision is still faltering, even in the twentieth year of the largest social network in the world, eight as of that year - over three billion people.
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