On February 4th, 2004, a little website called “Thefacebook” changed methods of communication forever. On this day in history, then 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg from Dobbs Ferry, New York, launched the now social media platform from his Harvard dorm room. What started as an idea to help college friends meet and stay connected turned into a revolution -digitally connecting people worldwide.

Mark Zuckerberg had already experimented with coding as a high school student, but the development and launch of  Thefacebook happened in his freshman Harvard dorm room. His fellow students with a Harvard student email address could register and create a basic profile using their information, such as their name, photo, gender and year of graduation.

By March 2004, Thefacebook was made available to Stanford University, Columbia and Yale University students. The initial success encouraged Mark Zuckerberg to drop out of Harvard to devote all of his attention to the new project. Facebook had officially become a reality, and there was no turning back!

Within months two large California companies, Accel Partners & Greylock Venture Funds, invested $12.7 million in Thefacebook. This kickstarted an online advertising campaign targeted towards college students at different universities across America. It was extremely effective, and by December 2004, almost one million users had registered with the platform and more than half of them were logging onto the website daily!

Since its humble beginnings in 2004, Thefacebook, now just Facebook, has remained the most used social networking platforms.  Today, Facebook has over 2 billion users worldwide, many of whom use the platform for hours each day. Since then, hundreds of other social media networks have been developed, some successful and others not, but few remain as large and impactful as Facebook.