Facebook’s First 10 Years in 10 Status Updates

Credit: AFP

How did anyone remember birthdays before Facebook? In the past decade, the site has ascended from a simple dorm-room project to a major international force — one that now plays a role in nearly all of our lives. According to the site’s own numbers from the end of 2013, Facebook now has some 757 million daily active users and 1.23 billion monthly active users — that’s roughly 17 percent of the earth’s population using the site at least once a month.

In honor of Facebook’s own 10th birthday, we’ve broken down 10 of the site’s biggest moments in handy status update form. Because, well, that’s just how we do things now.

Update on Feb. 4, 2004: Thefacebook is formally launched at thefacebook.com. The social network has its roots in the slightly more prurient Facesmash, a sort of Harvard-based version of Hot or Not, in which students are asked to compare images of their fellow coeds nabbed from the school’s online facebooks.

After attracting hundreds of users in a number of hours,  Jesse Eisenberg  Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s creator, is very nearly expelled for his efforts. Thefacebook’s launch would land the young programmer in hot water again when a trio of seniors accused him of misleading them and launching a competing service, resulting in a $300 million settlement and a pretty solid David Fincher movie.

Update in March 2004: Facebook expands beyond Harvard’s ivy-covered walls to a handful of similarly prestigious institutions, including Columbia, Stanford and Yale. It would stick to the more prestigious schools early on, staying largely Ivy League. By May 2005, however, the social network would be open to more than 800 colleges.

Update in June 2004: Napster master Sean Parker takes the helm, offering up a bit of “adult” supervision as the network’s president. The month also sees Facebook going fully Silicon Valley: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel snags a 10 percent stake of Thefacebook for $500,000, and the company moves its operations to Palo Alto.

Update in September 2005: Having already conquered the college scene, Facebook gets even more social — and a fair bit younger. A few months after finally snatching up the Facebook.com domain for a cool $200,000, the site opens to high school networks. A year later, it’ll expand things even further, officially creating a high-school version of the site and opening up to all users aged 13 and above with working email addresses.

Update in October 2005: Facebook launches its Photos application, notable for, among other things, a previously unheard-of unlimited storage for pictures. By 2007, the site has more monthly visitors than the rest of the photo services out there, and by 2008, it’s hosting more than 10 billion photos.

Update on April 26, 2006: Facebook for Mobile is launched, beginning a course that will define the service’s path for years to come. In 2008, the site will launch its first iPhone app, with its first Android app following a year later. All the work will finally hit a fever pitch in January 2013, when Facebook’s daily active mobile users surpass those on the Web for the first time. It’s big enough news for Zuckerberg to declare that his is now “a mobile company.”

Update on Oct. 24, 2007: After years of acquisition rumors, a tech powerhouse finally gets in on the Facebook action — or a part of it, at least. Microsoft announces the purchase of 1.6 percent of the company for $240 million. That price puts the social network’s value at a staggering $15 billion. Only a year prior, the site was reportedly considering selling to Yahoo (disclosure: us) for $1 billion.

Update on Jan. 5, 2008: If the aforementioned $15 billion valuation didn’t quite drive home how far the company had come in three short years, this should. A month after hitting 58 million users, Facebook and NBC announced early the following year that they would be teaming up to host a Republican presidential debate. Hosted by David Gregory of “Meet the Press,” the debate collected questions for the candidates via the social network, sadly eschewing its Hot or Not roots for serious political discourse.

Update on April 9, 2012: If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em. The addition of the Photos app allowed for some exponential growth of the social network, but by 2012, some newcomers had made a serious dent in Facebook’s photo-sharing dominance. As the financial world eagerly awaited the service’s IPO, Facebook released a major bombshell, announcing that it had picked up Instagram. The acquisition was far and away Facebook’s biggest purchase, with a price tag of $1 billion in stock and cash. Zuckerberg wasn’t particularly bullish about future acquisitions, noting that the purchase was instrumental in bolstering the site’s photo sharing experience.

Update on May 18, 2012: After years of eager Wall Street anticipation, Facebook finally went public. Fears of a market bubble were realized fairly quickly, when the company’s stock price plummeted from a high of $45 to $38 in the same day, dropping even further over the coming months, down to $17.58 in September of that year. These days, however, things are much brighter, with prices hovering around the low 60s, thanks in part to a solid fourth quarter.

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