Discovery of Facebook

Feb 4, 2004: You’ve Got a ‘Friend’ in TheFacebook

2004: Some college dudes unveil a website only Harvard University people can use. Seven years later it is worth $50 billion, and for hundreds of millions of people the site now called Facebook is so integral to daily life that, for all intents and purposes, it is the internet.
Trying to remember a time before Facebook? If you are in your 20s — like co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and the handful of college buddies who dreamed it up — that might be impossible. But even if you are in your 50s it’s a tad difficult to recall what the pre-Facebook world was like, even if you are only slightly digi-literate. Heck, even Betty White has heard of it.
So, consider: Friendster was the social media leader in early 2004. Google was still months away from an IPO which would revitalize the tech sector after the painful dot-com bust at the end of the previous millennium.
YouTube was still a year away. And Twitter, which has created something of a revolution of its own, would have been borderline indescribable.
None of that mattered to a driven young(er) Zuckerberg, whose innovative ethic (whether he believes it or not), is paid homage in The Social Network, the multiple–Oscar-nominated film that is must-viewing for any student of innovation, media disruption and Silicon Valley values.
The internet time in which what started out as TheFacebook zoomed from dorm project into tech behemoth makes it seem like an overnight success. But Facebook’s rise has not been without drama over the boundaries of privacy, the definition of “friend” and the etiquette of blocking your mother.
And then there are the lawsuits, since success has many parents.
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