On February 4, 2004, TheFacebook was born on the Harvard campus.
Mark Zuckerberg, a gifted 19-year-old engineer, programs the site in his student room, helped by three friends.
He sees TheFacebook as “
an online directory that connects individuals at universities
.”
Columbia, Stanford, Yale followed… Twenty years later, Meta has become a veritable social media empire that brings together 4 billion people around the world through its various platforms Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads.
It generated more than $116 billion in 2022.
Facebook is not the first social network to emerge.
Sixdegrees played the pioneers seven years earlier but failed to break through.
The young Zuckerberg is inspired by Napster, a pioneer in peer-to-peer sharing of music files, and MySpace, one of the first social networks.
Facebook must be a “
tool where everyone can express themselves by sharing what they want to highlight
,” he insists.
He succeeds.
Five days after its creation, 950 students adopted it.
Two months later, there are 30,000.
Even before graduating, the computer science and psychology student leaves the city of Cambridge for sunny Palo Alto.
He does not have a clear idea of his business model.
Nobody really takes it seriously.
But that doesn't stop him from thinking big...
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