A Decade of Facebook

Facebook 10 years

Facebook, the world's largest social media network and the most widely used one, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. For that age, the accomplishments are impressive. Facebook created the social networking boom, reached 1 billion users, scaled its infrastructure and revamped communications.

From "facemash" in 2003 to "thefacebook" in 2004, The social network that has came a long way was launched in a dorm room in Harvard University on February 4th, 2004. In its first couple years, Facebook was devoid of most aspects users are familiar with today. People can say that it has absolutely nothing that it has today. But for a college student, The Facebook was just for them. The limited features like photo album and friends tagging are desirable that students were excited with the new all-in-one social network. It was a great way to share pictures.

Then Facebook expanded to high school students and the exclusivity the college students had was gone. Fortunately, the two demographics could not actually interact because they were entirely separate entities with no ability to communicate with one another. And not before long, the two sides merged. One year later, and one more changes were made to grow the site, and Facebook was finally opened to everyone.

On May 18, 2012, Facebook made its long-awaited IPO, resulting in both a massive influx of cash and a significant increase in the pressure to make more. Waiting so long to conduct an IPO caused Facebook to receive an incredibly high valuation for a company. Consequently, from day one, the stock price fell. But despite that, the social network reached a billion users milestone.

More than a year later on July 31, 2013, it finally returned to its original offering price at $38, and has generally continued to move up steadily. The resulting capital has given Facebook the opportunity to introduce major new features like Graph Search, make significant acquisitions, and even attempt others despite how over-the-top they may seem.

Today, Facebook has 1.26 billion registered users who "likes" 3.2 billion times a day. As a company that claims to be one of the most profiting and most famous in the internet industry had received many criticism. But that does not stop it to expand to from one of the most well-known brand into new avenues and new global market.

"Facebook has been successful because it's not afraid to change often," said former Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor. The company has been experimenting on numerous features to see how they benefit. And these innovations are what made the "brains" keep rolling to see what is good to expect for a company that is young but aims big.

For a company that have encountered criticisms over the years, it's still clearly heading in the right direction. Its main source of revenue, advertising, soared 76 percent, to $2.34 billion, from the same quarter a year ago. And mobile, where industry heavyweights are betting the future, represented half of its total revenue. About 945 million people use Facebook each month from a smartphone or tablet.

But it's just not the company's grand $5 billion debut that marks its success as an internet giant. Things like News Feed, the Facebook Platform, and other successful experiments that define Facebook and the people behind it.

The company that was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes were still young. But its impact in the industry is significantly huge that social media is becoming a primary need for some people.

Mark Zuckerberg said in a post:

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today. That's why I'm even more excited about the next ten years than the last. The first ten years were about bootstrapping this network. Now we have the resources to help people across the world solve even bigger and more important problems.

Zuckerberg has big plans by giving new ways of sharing and communicating. Facebook will build more tools and then monetize them. And its next 10 years are going to be more challenging.

If asked what is Facebook going to do next, "Add the next billion (users)," said Sheryl Sandberg, the company's Chief Operating Officer and best-selling author. She mentioned Africa and Asia as fertile territory for the next wave of growth, which is sure to please advertisers who increasingly are buying space on the social-networking giant's site.

Facebook has certainly changed a lot since it was born. And what it did, it changed our way of communicating.