Facebook, the world's most widely used social network, celebrates its 10th anniversary today. It's come a long way from its beginnings as a wayward Harvard student's dorm room hack. From Facemash, to 'thefacebook,' to its official public debut in September 2006, to its May 2012 IPO, the social network and has undergone some pretty massive transformations in a relatively short time.
Today, Facebook has 1.26 billion registered users who record 3.2 billion likes per day. The company can also claim one of the most successful initial public offerings in history, and despite criticism that it's dead to teens (or dying in general), the social network continues to expand into new avenues and new global markets.
But it's just not the company's grand $5 billion debut that marks its success as an internet giant. It's things like News Feed, the Facebook Platform, and other successful experiments that define Facebook and the people behind it.
In short, none of the social network's success would have been possible without constant iteration and innovation. While not everything Facebook tried was a hit (as you'll see below), the company learned from its mistakes and moved forward. With that in mind, here are are decade's worth of Facebook milestones.
The Wall and Messaging
Facebook launched in February 2004 with a key feature called The Wall. It served as the original profile space for users. You could post on your wall (text only) or your friends', and in May 2008, each profile had a Wall-to-Wall limit of 40 messages. The Wall also listed changes to a given user's profile, like when their profile picture was edited, or if they added new friends. Another key feature of Facebook available since its inception is personal messaging, which allowed Facebook users to message one or more friends at a time.
Facebook Notes let users get bloggy
In August 2006, Facebook introduced Notes, a mini blogging platform that eventually allowed users to import personal posts from other sites like LiveJournal, Xanga, and Blogger. Notes still exists on the site, but it's been buried in recent redesigns. Notes could become more of a Tumblr competitor, based on some of its acquisitions.
News Feed streams your Facebook friends' activity
On September 6, 2006, the social network introduced the first of a series of major changes to the overall Facebook experience: News Feed. It's still the first thing we see every time we open up Facebook: a reverse chronological (well, originally) log of our friends' Facebook activities. News Feed compiled status updates, profile changes, birthdays, and upcoming events, among other things. It also featured a Mini Feed on your profile page, which was a timeline of your personal activities.
A Marketplace for selling stuff to other Facebookers
Possibly trying to capitalize on the continued success of Craigslist, Facebook introduced Marketplace in May 2007. You could post free classified ads (available or wanted) in one of four categories: For Sale, Housing, Jobs, and Other. Facebook gave up on Marketplace in 2009 - presumably because it wasn't seeing much usage - transferring ownership to Oodle.
Tagging and attachments come to The Wall
Starting in July 2007, users could post attachments to one another's walls - things like photos and videos. And starting in December 2009, Facebook adopted a feature innovated by Twitter: tagging. You could put the name of a friend, an event name, or a brand or group name, and tag them in a post. The tag would link back to their page or profile. Facebook added tagging to comments in early 2011.
Beacon creeps everybody out with targeted ads
Launched in November 2007, Beacon let Facebook users easily share information from 44 partner websites, including things like transactions on Fandango or eBay, to their Facebook friends. But Beacon was clearly designed for advertisers, not users. Beacon used data from these external sites in order to customize advertising based on someone's outside Facebook activities and was originally an opt-out service. But within a month Facebook about-faced and made it opt-in. Zuckerberg shut it down entirely in September 2009 and announced it was a 'mistake' on the Facebook Blog in November 2011.
Facebook introduces the Like button
Do you remember Facebook before the Like button? Neither do I. In February 2009 Facebook debuted perhaps its most iconic feature: the Like button. Indicated by a blue-hued thumbs up, an icon that now adorns the Facebook campus, the Like button let you show support, interest, or good humor in someone else's post. The Like button eventually expanded outside the confines of Facebook in April 2010. By September of that year, 350,000 sites installed Like buttons directly on their webpages. Today we click the Like button 3.2 billion times each day.
Facebook gets the gaming bug with Zynga
In May 2010, Zynga introduced its now famous gaming titles on the Facebook platform: Mafia Wars, Cafeworld, and perhaps biggest of all, Farmville. These popular titles spawned a boom in Facebook games. During the first three quarters of 2012, for example, the game developer was responsible for driving 13 percent of Facebook's revenue. But the relationship between the two companies has chilled in recent years after both chose to relax the parameters of the initial five year deal they signed in 2010. For its own part, Zynga has struggled as gamers have increasingly turned to smartphones and tablets. In fact, the company recently laid off 15 percent of its workforce - mind you, that's after laying off 18 percent of its workforce and closing offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas last summer.
Facebook takes on Foursquare with short-lived 'Places'
With the mobile revolution going strong, Foursquare emerged as an early must-have app for checking-in and sharing your location with friends. Naturally, Facebook copied and created its own check-in service, Places, in August 2010. In November of that year, the social network expanded Places with Deals, which allowed users to check in to businesses and get coupons or discounts - getting in on the daily deals trend. Deals, dubbed an experiment, only lasted four months. Places, on the other hand, while axed a year later, was simply redistributed within Facebook. Instead of Places being a destination, checking-in and sharing location became a more streamlined part of the experience.
Facebook Messages, the 'Gmail Killer'
Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Facebook Messages service on November 15, 2010. It gave all users @facebook.com email addresses and combined email, regular messages, text messaging, and instant messaging. It was predicted to be the 'Gmail killer,' with all-in-one messaging (and dedicated Messenger app, which debuted in August of 2011), but hasn't quite lived up to such lofty expectations. On Android, beginning in December 2012, you could even use Facebook Messenger without a Facebook account with just your name and phone number.
Facebook introduces Timeline, a new kind of profile
Perhaps one of the most controversial changes to Facebook's interface in its history, the company's Timeline launched in September 2011. Billed as 'a new kind of profile that lets you highlight photos, posts and life events,' Timeline restructured your profile as, well, a timeline, but with a large cover photo across the top of the page. It rolled out slowly to users, and was made available worldwide January 24, 2012.
Facebook finally launches an iPad app
On October 10, 2011, after years of waiting, Facebook finally released a dedicated iPad app. One of its hallmark features was the way you could view photos and videos, full screen and high resolution. It also launched into other apps like The Daily, the former iPad-only newspaper app, if you clicked one of its links. It shared a lot of the same design elements as the iPhone app, but was finally built to take advantage of the larger tablet display.
Facebook buys Instagram and starts tinkering
In April 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion. Not long after, Instagram started showing signs of Facebook's influence (or, so it seemed). One of its first post-Facebook updates was a maps update that pinpointed all of your photos visually on a map unless you opted out. Instagram also aped Vine by allowing users to upload 15-second videos, and recently, a Direct feature was announced, allowing users to send semi-private Instagrams to only a select group of friends.
'Home' brings Facebook to your home screen
The Facebook Phone is a unicorn we've been hearing about off and on for years. In April 2013, it finally surfaced in the form of Facebook Home - a way to turn your Android phone into a Facebook-centric device. It's essentially an Android home screen, a skin, and it debuted on the HTC First handset (but now you can grab it from Google Play). We dubbed it an ' apperating system ', a platform that sits in between the OS and your apps. It controls the home screen, can see what apps you're running, and includes a new messaging feature called Chatheads. The latter lets you chat with friends anywhere in the UI, their profile images popping up as small, circular chat head icons. People expected Facebook Home to take over Android, but it seems to remain a niche UI.
Facebook introduces creepy but powerful Graph Search
Facebook debuted Graph Search, a new way to look up users and information about them, in July 2013. Graph Search functions on natural language queries, searches like 'Restaurants my friends in New York like' or 'Friends who are vegan.' Graph Search lets you discover very specific information about Facebook users, and sparked another round of privacy concerns because of that.
Paper app gives Facebook the Flipboard treatment
Facebook's mobile apps have always struggled with presenting you information and status updates in a way that looks good and makes sense for mobile. The Facebook Paper iOS app, however, finally seems tailored specifically to the mobile interface. The gesture-focused app places a stronger emphasis on photos and curated content. It debuted just before Facebook's 10th anniversary, on February 3rd.
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