What is Facebook?
Facebook is a popular free social networking website, that allows users to create personal profiles, upload photos and videos, send messages and keep in touch with friends and family. It was founded in February 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA by Mark Zuckerberg; who originally launched the site as a Harvard sophomore and ran it as one of his hobby projects, with financial aid from Eduardo Saverin. The site was first called “thefacebook.com” and instantly became a big hit. Now, thirteen years later, it has become one of the biggest websites in the world and has over 1.86 billion monthly active users. The largest demographic on Facebook is people aged 25-34.
Facebook was surrounded by controversy very quickly. A week after he launched the site in 2004, Mark was accused by three Harvard seniors of stealing the idea from them. This accusation soon became a full-fledged lawsuit as the Harvard seniors sued Mark and Facebook fir theft and fraud, as they founded a competing company. This lawsuit was settled in 2008 for $65 million.
By June 2009, Facebook became the number one social network site in the United States; exceeding MySpace. Moreover, in October 2010, a movie about the start of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg is released, entitled “The Social Network”. Facebook has since gone on to purchase popular photo sharing app Instagram and mobile messaging service Whatsapp for a total of $20 billion. As of March 2017, it is the second most visited site in the world.
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