History of Facebook

Facebook was launched in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University along with two other students, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Facebook, when launched was originally known as TheFacebook. The original concept of Facebook started at Harvard and expanded to other universities in Boston and the Ivy League Schools where it became very popular. Other than MySpace, it is the second largest social network available to individuals. After its launching, few months after in August 2005 the name was officially changed from Thefacebook to Facebook, and the facebook.com was purchased for $200 000 dollars. Facebook, when it was originally created, was only available to individuals who attend an education institution. Based on it popularity since September 2006, any individual with a valid email address has been allowed to join Facebook. Since its launch, it has gained over 8 million users in the U.S.A and over 30 million users worldwide. Facebook is free to all users, due to the amount of investors that have put money into it. Investors include Microsoft, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) and many more. Google and Yahoo! have also tried to purchase Facebook but have not succeeded. Due to the large volume of advertising, individuals are allowed to sign up for free without any charge.