Interesting information about the creator of Facebook. The true story of the founding of Facebook

Who created Facebook?

The largest social network in the world, Facebook, appeared in 2004. Today it is so popular that many simply cannot imagine life without it. Of course, everyone is interested in who created Facebook, who created this site.

Who created Facebook

Let's turn to the history of the creation of a popular social network. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz. Only then it was called The Facebook. At 23, young Zuckerberg became a billionaire, the very first billionaire on the planet in his age.

While still in his 2nd year, Mark Zuckerberg created the Facemash website in 2003. He hacked into parts of the Harvard University network, copied private photos for himself, and then used them on this site. The photos were placed in pairs in random order, and users were asked to choose the more attractive person from the pair in their opinion. You can’t even imagine how many visitors the site received in just the first 2 hours of operation! As many as 450 people and 22 thousand views! Facemash developed at a tremendous pace, but it was soon closed by the Harvard administration, and Zuckerberg was accused of violating copyright, security and privacy. Mark was expelled from the university.

Fortunately, the charges were dropped after some time. And in early 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began creating a completely new website. The site got its name from the school where he studied. There, each student was given a directory that contained photographs, addresses and telephone numbers of all classmates. This interesting reference book was called “The Photo Address Book”, although everyone changed it to short “The Facebook”.

At the very beginning, The Facebook was intended only for students at Harvard University. The site later became available to other US educational institutions with an email address in the "edu" domain. And only in 2006, it became possible to register on Facebook for all Internet users over 13 years of age who had an email address.

Biography of the one who created Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, was born on May 14, 1984. If we talk about Mark’s parents, his mother is a psychologist, and his father is a dentist. Mark is not the only child in the family; he has 3 more sisters: Randy, Donna and Ariel. Mark began to get interested in computer programming as a child, while he was at school. Then he created a version of the game "Risk" on the Internet. After attending school, Zuckerberg was offered jobs at Microsoft and AOL. But Mark entered Harvard University to study psychology, refusing employment. But in addition to his main studies, he additionally took IT courses.

Of course, Mark Zuckerberg did not develop Facebook alone, but together with Chris Hughes. In the field of finance, he was helped by another student, Eduardo Saverin. Therefore, it is impossible to answer unequivocally about who created Facebook. In 2005, the relationship between Zuckerberg and Saverin turned into legal proceedings. Its subject was an attempt to remove Saverin from control.

As for the marital status of the Facebook creator, at 27 years old, Mark Zuckerberg is single. But it’s too early to rejoice at his fans; he has a girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. They have been dating since the beginning of their studies at Harvard University. The friend of the man who created Facebook is of Chinese-American descent. They write that Mark is learning Chinese in order to go to China with Priscilla. Not long ago, rumors began to circulate that Mark Zuckerberg had proposed to his girlfriend, judging by the words of Bill Gates, who in his interview called Priscilla Mark’s fiancée. No one excludes the possibility that this was a slip of the tongue.

Facebook is one of the modern times. Despite this, there are people who have not been able to fully understand all its features.

Facebook: what is it?

Facebook is a social network developed in early 2004 and implemented at the end of the same year. At first, the site was called Thefacebook and only Harvard University students had access to it. A little later, the network expanded the range of participants to all students in the United States of America, and two years after its launch, anyone who had reached the age of thirteen and had a personal account could create an account on Facebook. With the expansion of the audience, the site slightly changed its name to simply Facebook, under which it continues continues to develop to this day.

Today, Facebook is a social network that is the largest and one of the most popular on the Internet. It is noteworthy that the Russian-language version of the site was launched four years after the creation of the network, and at the moment the counter of registered participants from different countries of the planet has already exceeded six hundred million people. But despite such an impressive number, people are divided into two camps: adherents of this site and those who, to put it mildly, are not entirely satisfied with the functions responsible for how to use Facebook.

Registration procedure on the site

In order to get an account on Facebook, you need to go through standard registration on the official website facebook.com. There you are asked to fill out a registration form, all fields of which are required:

surname;
personal email address (will be used to log into the site);
password (must include Latin letters and numbers);
Date of Birth.

By the way, after registration you can hide your date of birth for viewing.

After filling out the form, click “Registration”, after which you will be sent an email to the specified email address confirming your registration. Next, the site will ask you to take a few more steps before you start fully using the service:

Search for friends: the site offers to find your acquaintances already registered on the network, with whom you communicated by email (mail.ru, gmail.com or other service), as well as via Skype.
Profile information: indicate your school, university and place of work, as well as your name in English and Russian.
Profile photo: You can upload a photo from your computer or take it from your webcam.

How to use Facebook?

Facebook is a social network in its classic form. You optionally indicate personal information (country, city where you live and where you have been, age, education, place of work, etc.), add photos and videos, create lists of your preferences (movies watched, favorite music and performers, teams and athletes , restaurants, clubs, events and the like). You can correspond with friends, post interesting posts, and also use additional programs within the network (games, polls and other entertainment).

But you can use the service not only as a standard social network. It is also possible to use it to promote your business on the Internet and attract new clients.

Relationships between Facebook users.

Network users have the opportunity to add other participants as friends, subscribe to their pages and even wink at each other.

1.Adding friends and subscribing to their updates. In order to protect your account, the developers have provided restrictions on adding friends in the form of a limit of 5,000 people. Also, if you do not have common information with a potential friend (for example, school, university, etc.), then you will be asked if you know the user. If not, you will be given a warning. If there is a large accumulation of such warnings, your account may be blocked.

When you add a friend, you can subscribe to their updates. There is a special button in his profile for this. Until the user confirms their friendship, you are automatically subscribed to his updates. In the future, you can unsubscribe from them, while maintaining your friendship.

By the way, your friends are divided into groups by default, which depend on the data you specify. For example, friends from school, university, city, relatives and loved ones. If you want, you can create groups yourself, as you wish.

2. "Wink" function on Facebook. What it is? Why this application is needed remains a mystery. After all, besides the fact that this is a kind of “Hello” to another user, it does not provide any functionality anymore. You can wink at each other an infinite number of times.

Correspondence on Facebook

Messages on Facebook are divided into two types: inbox and other. The second group automatically includes those sent from those who are not your friends on the site. This is done in order to reduce the amount of spam.

For communication between users, a special Facebook email is used. What it is? This is your personal Facebook email address, which consists of your name and ends with @facebook.com. For example, [email protected].

To view the archive of your correspondence, just go to “Messages”. Then a window will open displaying a complete list of your interlocutors. You can also exchange messages on the site via chat. Then each of your correspondence will be open in a small window at the bottom of the browser, and you can further study, for example, your news feed.

Facebook and your website

Today you may not have your own website, but almost all entrepreneurs have a group or community on a social network. Many people create an account, and in addition they also create a page with their business. This can be either a company profile or a group for your personal business, for example, if you sew clothes to order or paint pictures.

If you have both a page on a social network and your own website, then to achieve your goal (distributing information about your business and attracting more clients), it is necessary for these two resources to overlap with each other. To do this, a widget for your Facebook community is placed on the site. What it is?

A group widget is a small block that contains information about your page on a social network, for example, the number of subscribers and the last post posted. With its help, a site visitor can also join a group and be always up to date with your latest news.

How to add a Facebook widget to a website? To place it, you need to insert a special html code into the page of your website, which can be obtained on the Facebook website in the section for developers.

There you click on "Lixe Box" and create your widget by simply filling out the form:

Facebook Page URL - paste the copied address of your group on Facebook.
Width - specify the width of the future widget.
Height - specify the height of the widget.
Show Friends’ Faces - check this box if you want the widget to display subscribers’ faces.
Show Posts - check the box if you want the widget to display the latest posts of the group.

After filling out all the lines, click “Get code” and copy the result to the pages of your site.

Mobile version of Facebook

Today, many websites exist in two versions: regular and mobile. Facebook is no exception.

The mobile version of the service has a more simplified interface. Here, unnecessary pictures and videos have been removed, leaving only text, which significantly increases the speed of page processing. How to use Facebook in such a simplified version? It's just as simple! You, as before, can use all the functions of Facebook: view pages, photos and videos, write messages, change status, comment, and so on.

It is worth noting that more than a third of participants already use primarily the mobile version of the social network.

Difference between Facebook and other social networks

The main difference between Facebook is not the interface, as one might assume. Its peculiarity lies in a number of functions that are not available to other social networks. The most valuable of them is the privacy settings.

All sorts of fables about Facebook and its “real” owners are floating around the Internet. Some are sure that everything is run solely by Mark Zuckerberg, others are convinced that this social network is the product of intelligence services monitoring the Internet-active population. In fact, Facebook belongs to a number of shareholders who saw it as a profitable business project.

The emergence of Facebook as a profitable company

Facebook, of course, owes its existence to Mark Zuckerberg. It was this man’s enthusiasm that led the initially small project to the success we see today. The year of birth of the social network is officially recognized as 2004, and at that time Facebook was available only to Harvard students. Throughout the year, the social network has been actively growing, “capturing” students from American and Canadian universities. By that time, programmer Dustin Moskowitz and Mark’s classmate Eduardo Saverin had already joined Zuckerberg as financial director.

The turning point for the project was Mark’s acquaintance with Sean Parker, at that time already a well-known Internet entrepreneur. Sean was one of the first to see the huge business potential in the new product and convinced its founders to register Facebook as an independent company. As president of the newly formed company, Parker began searching for investors.

The first to respond to the tempting offer was Peter Thiel, the founder of the PayPal payment system. Later, a response came from Reed Hoffman, another famous Internet businessman. Investments from investors and the active work of developers led to the fact that already in 2006, Facebook became an international social network.

In 2007, Microsoft bought a 1.5% stake in Facebook, which also gained the opportunity to place its advertising on the site. And already in 2009 it became known that Facebook was making a profit. At the same time, the company became a leader in profitability among Internet projects. To this day, she has not lost her position.

Current situation

Today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is its main owner and CEO. He accounts for 28.2% of the company's shares. Programmer Dustin Moskowitz is also not out of business and holds 7.6% of the shares. The largest third-party investor to date is Accel Partners. The company owns 11.4% of the shares. Russian representatives of Internet business are not giving up their positions either. Mail.ru Group holds a 5.5% stake in Facebook.

Thus, Mark Zuckerberg created and gave impetus to Facebook. But without the support and active work of his comrades, the project could very quickly wither and not gain the glory that it can boast of today.

Probably, now few people do not know about the existence of the popular social network Facebook. But few people know about the history of creation and who created Facebook.

Facebook is one of the most powerful social networks in the world. In just a few years, it managed to transform from a service for communicating with a few friends into a huge Internet platform. Almost everyone is talking about Facebook now and many cannot imagine life without it, especially for the progressive younger generation.

Who invented Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg is the creator of Facebook. This is a young man who has an unconventional view of how people communicate with each other. Some believe that Zuckerberg is a selfless genius who managed to make all of humanity happy. Others are convinced that he is a thief who has no principles and only thinks about getting his hands on more money. Well, someone thinks that the guy is just lucky, who managed to create a service for himself, and in the end promoted it, reaching heights. As they say: “How many people, so many opinions.”

History of Facebook creation

Those who are interested in the history of Facebook need, first of all, to find out in what year it was created - in 2004 on February 4th. Then Mark Zuckerberg studied at Harvard University, lived in a dormitory and created the website thefacebook.com. It was created specifically for students studying at Harvard and was a . In a few hours, the site gained several hundred users who could register, create their own pages, post information on them, exchange it with other users, and leave comments. At that time, the young man gave people the opportunity to communicate, and today Facebook has become an important part of a third of the world's population.

We learned about the name of the creator of Facebook, but there are some facts about the history of the social network that will be interesting to know.

Interesting Facts

The creator of the Facebook network, Mark Zuckerberg, did not think about the name for a very long time. The fact is that at the school where the young man studied, high school students were given directories with addresses, phone numbers and photos of other students. The guys called this directory “The Facebook”. Only a year later, Zuckerberg decided to remove the article “the” as well, when the opportunity arose to buy the domain name facebook.com, which cost 200 thousand. Those who are interested in why Zuckerberg chose blue as the main color of the website should know that the young man is deutanopic (he can’t distinguish between green and red colors well, blue – well). The young man not only created Facebook, but also became its first user. On September 26, 2006, Facebook became a public social network. From that moment on, each person can register and create their own page, indicating their email address when registering.

It would seem like an ordinary student prank - creating a website for students to communicate. But this is what led to the fact that an ordinary American guy became the youngest billionaire in history. In 2010, Zuckerberg was featured in the March issue of Forbes magazine, where he was recognized as the richest person in the world. Zuckerberg's capital was estimated at $4 billion, despite the fact that the young man was then a 25-year-old guy. Just six months after this, the publication’s experts estimated Mark’s fortune at $7 billion.

Today, the guy’s fortune has grown three times more than when Facebook was created - $13.3 billion. What’s most interesting is that the guy still continues to wear jeans and a T-shirt, sneakers or flip-flops. What the guy is trying to show by this remains a mystery. Either that he is just an ordinary student or that they mean nothing to him.

Current situation

The company owns 11.4% of the shares. Russian representatives of Internet business are not giving up their positions either. Mail.ru Group holds a 5.5% stake in Facebook.

Facebook: success story

There is not a person in the modern civilized world who has not heard about Facebook. The most successful business project of the 21st century, a breakthrough in the field of communications, a tool that can change the world, the most visited site on the Internet... All this applies to Facebook. What is the phenomenon of social networking? How did an average student turn a small website run from his dorm room into a $100 billion company in just a few years? The answer to this and other questions can be found by looking at the history of Facebook.

A few words about Zuckerberg

You can't start describing Facebook without talking about the company's founder.

The creator of the largest social network of our time, Mark Zuckerberg, was born on May 14, 1984 in the small town of White Plains, which is located near New York. Mark’s family was the most ordinary: his father worked as a dentist, his mother was a psychiatrist. Zuckerberg was the second child and had one older and two younger sisters.

Mark developed a love for programming at school. Already at the age of 11, he wrote websites, and in the ninth grade he created the computer game “Risk”. In addition, Zuckerberg, together with a school friend, came up with an MP3 player that could automatically create playlists based on user preferences.

But if you think that Zuckerberg was only good at programming, then you are very mistaken. Mark is a winner of school Olympiads in astronomy, mathematics, physics and languages. In addition, he was an excellent fencer and knew Hebrew, Latin, ancient Greek and French.

After graduating from a private school in New Hampshire, Mark was invited to work by two leading US IT companies - AOL and Microsoft. However, he did not agree, preferring to study at one of the most prestigious universities in the world - Harvard.

Zuckerberg entered the Faculty of Psychology. In his second year, he moved into the Kirkland House student dormitory. Here the talented student became even more interested in programming. In the early days, Mark created an online application called Course Match. This service made it possible to find out which Harvard students would take a particular course. This application very quickly became popular among students. Mark also earned extra money by making custom programs. Zuckerberg did not spend much time studying.

Facebook at its inception

Mark proposed to implement something similar at the university, but the management refused him. So Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard's servers and created a website called Facemash, where students could go and vote on photos that were submitted in pairs. In the survey, you had to choose your favorite photo. The site was rapidly gaining popularity, but it only existed for a few days, after which it was closed. Mark's actions caused outrage among the university leadership and several student organizations. The question of Zuckerberg's expulsion was raised, but Mark apologized, after which the charges were dropped.

This event occurred at the end of October 2003. In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg seriously began developing a new project. On February 4th, thefacebook.com website went live. In just a month, more than half of Harvard students registered on the resource, with 70 percent of them accessing the site daily. Zuckerberg could not cope with the increasingly popular site on his own, so he brought his roommates to work on the project. Dustin Moskowitz worked on the software, and Chris Hughes promoted the site. This project was financed by Eduardo Saverin.

Just a few days after the opening of the site, the Winklevoss brothers, for whom Zuckerberg once worked, said that Mark stole the idea of creating a social network at Harvard from them. This became the subject of a lawsuit that dragged on for several years and resulted in the brothers receiving $65 million.

Over the next few months, all Ivy League universities were connected to the resource. Amazingly, when each educational institution connected to Facebook, most of the students of that university quickly joined.

In the summer of 2004, Mark meets Sean Parker, who agrees to join his team. The guys decide to rent a house in Palo Alto, the historical center of Silicon Valley.

The rapid growth of the social network

In Palo Alto, the guys started optimizing Facebook and connecting new servers. The social network caused the effect of a bomb exploding. More than 80 percent of Ivy League students registered, two-thirds of whom logged on daily and were extremely active. The load on the resource was colossal, so Mark chose the only correct strategy - to connect new universities and colleges to the network only when technical capabilities allow it.

The new school year was supposed to start in September, and with it a new surge in Facebook user activity. The guys planned to connect new universities and colleges, whose students were already looking forward to this. Zuckerberg and his team worked most actively at night. The best decisions, according to Mark, were made at 3-4 o'clock in the morning. While working, the guys communicated with each other using the AIM program. The mansion was in chaos. Empty energy drink cans and other trash lay everywhere. From time to time the company threw noisy parties. In general, the guys did not get bored in Palo Alto.

Meanwhile, Sean Parker was registering the company and searching for investors. By mid-2004, Facebook was already officially registered. Soon investors were found. The first of them was Peter Thiel, one of the founders of the PayPal payment system. He invested $500,000 in the network, receiving in return about 10% of the shares and a seat on the board of directors.

Autumn arrived and the network continued to expand. People have already started talking seriously about Facebook. At the end of 2004, the number of users exceeded one million, and the company's estimated value reached $90 million. But Mark Zuckerberg wasn't after money. He realized that if he maintained complete control of the company, he could change the world.

The next investor was Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million in Facebook. The company now owns a 10 percent stake in the social network.

In the new year 2005, Mark continues to develop the network and connect universities and colleges to it. That same year, Zuckerberg launched a photo service inside Facebook. In addition, the site design has been updated.

After connecting universities, the company took on schools. There were fears that schoolchildren would not appreciate the resource, but they were not confirmed. But the attempt to create working networks ended in failure.

In the summer of 2005, Mark purchased the facebook.com domain for a huge sum of $200,000. That same summer, Sean Parker resigned as president of the company due to a drug scandal.

Further development of Facebook and its unprecedented prospects

At the beginning of 2006, 25 million people were already communicating online. The company's specialists were developing two innovations at once - a news feed and public registration. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg was in talks with Yahoo! about the sale of the company. But if the Internet giant wanted to purchase Facebook for $1 billion, then Mark was simply trying to find out the price of his brainchild.

At the beginning of September, the news feed was launched. Within a matter of hours, a major scandal broke out: while working to ensure that users could see the most interesting news from the lives of their friends, Zuckerberg and his team forgot about privacy settings. Numerous protest groups emerged, and articles condemning Mark's actions were published one after another in newspapers and blogs. But instead of immediately correcting the mistake and apologizing, Zuckerberg simply monitored the situation. Ultimately, Mark did what he had to do, but this incident still left a stain on the company’s reputation.

At the end of the month, anyone could register on the network. Now not only students and schoolchildren, but also middle-aged and older people could join Facebook.

The number of network participants grew rapidly, and already in October 2007 the barrier of 50 million people was overcome. There was a need for new investments in the company, so Mark began to negotiate with two Internet giants at once - Google and Microsoft. As a result of these negotiations, Microsoft and Facebook entered into an advertising agreement. In addition, the Internet giant acquired several percent of the shares, based on the value of Facebook at $15 billion.

In August 2008, the 100 millionth user was registered, in 2010 the number of network users reached 500 million, and in 2012 it exceeded a billion.

In 2012, Facebook shares went public. At the same time, the estimated value of the company was more than $100 billion.

But Mark Zuckerberg is not going to stop there and sets quite ambitious goals for himself - to increase the network to 3-5 billion people. The network continues to actively develop, developers are working on new functions and improving old ones.

Now Zuckerberg is at the height of his fame, owning a controlling stake in the most popular Internet resource and several billion dollars. But this man is not even thirty years old! This is real success!

Section: Motivation

Business ideas

Motivation

Documentation

Taxes

Business

Mark Zuckerberg born on May 14, 1984 in one of the wealthy areas of New York.

He was raised along with his three sisters in the family of a dentist and a psychiatrist. Even in elementary school, I began to show increased interest in programming. And with the advent of the first computer, he plunged headlong into his hobby. Mark was in sixth grade then. Mark created his first serious achievement in the field of programming - a computer version of the board game "Risk" - by the beginning of the ninth grade.

While still a student, together with a friend he wrote a program for MP3 - player Winamp. Using this program, the computer not only analyzed the user’s musical interests, but also independently created playlists that suited him. After the newly created program was made available for free access to the Internet, Microsoft Corporation offered Mark Zuckerberg about two million dollars for his brainchild. However, Mark refused the deal - as it turns out later, the future billionaire and founder of Facebook has a complex and unpredictable character.

Despite his incredible passion for computer programming, young Zuckerberg finds time to both study and practice his favorite sport - fencing. Mark Zuckerberg excelled in science and mathematics, and also, while immersing himself in antiquity, studied ancient languages. His interest in ancient languages was so strong that one day he completely devoted his summer holidays to attending ancient Greek language courses at a summer school. The result is the ability to read and write fluently in both classical languages. Despite this, when entering university, the young man chooses a discipline completely unrelated to languages - psychology.

Mark Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, where he was almost expelled for hacking the university database. He posted photos of students in pairs on his website, encouraging users to vote for the more attractive one. In just four hours, the number of site visitors increased to half a thousand. The management of the educational institution cut off the resource, obliging Zuckerberg to apologize to the allegedly injured students. However, this idea was so approved by the students that they demanded that the university administration immediately restore the resource. After reopening the resource, half of all Harvard students registered there within just two weeks. And by mid-spring, the list of users of one of the first social portals, Facebook, also included students from such famous universities as Yale and Stanford.

Thanks to the convenience of a hierarchical system that organizes users by groups, courses and many other parameters, as well as the ability to post photos and any other personal information, Facebook is becoming incredibly popular among students. The main advantages of Facebook include the fact that it is a social network for real people to find real people. Also here you can independently define the user group that will have access to your profile.

A chance meeting with Sean Parker, an Internet cult figure and one of the creators of Napster, a file-sharing program, turned the life of the Facebook founder in a different direction. Thanks to Parker, Mark Zuckerberg meets an experienced businessman and co-founder of the PayPal payment system, Peter Thiel, who, after a fifteen-minute conversation with Mark, decided to invest him for 500 thousand dollars. Mark Zuckerberg leaves his studies at the university, writing an application for an indefinite academic leave, and devotes himself entirely to work.

At first glance, $500,000 is a fairly large amount, but it was still not enough to fully satisfy all the financial needs of the new startup. Mark and his company had to rent space in Palo Alto. The working conditions were completely uncomfortable - there was not enough furniture for everyone, the rooms with servers were not ventilated, and the Californian heat above 45 degrees Celsius made it impossible to work.

In the fall of 2004, the social network Facebook had more than a million users. And six months later, thanks to the help of Peter Thiel, the company received a serious investment of $12.7 million from Accel Partners, thanks to which the number of active users reached the five million mark in the fall of 2005.

After some time, the rules of the popular social network were slightly changed. Anyone could become a Facebook user if they had a valid email address. According to Forbes magazine, the 23-year-old Facebook founder is 785th on the list of the world's billionaires and worth $1.5 billion. Mark Zuckerberg is rightfully considered the youngest billionaire in history.