The Evolution of Communication: Facebook Edition Part 1
For the Evolution of Communication project I decided to focus in on Facebook. Facebook has been a constant social media platform in my life. I used it to connect with family, future schoolmates, and old friends. I personally have never had a bad experience using Facebook, but in the past couple years Facebook has been getting backlash associated with privacy. To be honest I never really thought about the issues associated with the privacy settings until I was assigned this project. Before I go into my opinions on that I want to tell you a little history on Facebook.
Attached to the left is a picture of the first 10 years of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes were four Harvard students that wanted to connect students together. They first launched Facemash in 2003. This site was used for Harvard students to upload picture of themselves and have others rate how attractive they were. The 4 boys violated some university rules, so the site was shut down just have two days of being launched. Zuckerberg did not give up on trying to create a platform for students to connect. On February 4th, 2004 he launched TheFacebook.com. This site was used for students to post their class schedules and information about their lives. By June 2004 250,000 students from 34 different U.S. colleges have joined this social media platform. At the end of 2004 it had reached 1 million users. It was still not considered the most popular social media platform as it still had fewer active users then Myspace. In 2005 Facebook was open up to high school and international college students. This increased the number of active users up to 6 million. In 2006 the site was opened up to anyone above the age of 13. This is when the privacy issues started to escalate. In 2006 every time a user changed something on their profile it would be uploaded to their news feed where everyone could see it. People did not think all this information should be made public, so they complained. In 2007 the site launched a service called Beacon that let users' friends see what products they had purchased from participating companies. This service was taken down after a short time because users felt like it violated their privacy. With all these privacy issues, Facebook did not really slow down with gaining active users. In October 2012 the site hit 1 billion active users. This is a brief history to understand the start of Facebook. To learn more about the history click these links link 1 link 2 .
Below is also a snapshot of the history breaken down into years founded on
February 2004 - Facebook (then called "thefacebook") was founded by Zuckerberg, Moskovitz, Saverin, and Hughes.
March 2004 - Facebook spreads to three other college campuses - Yale, Columbia, and Stanford.
June 2004 - Facebook moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California.
September 2004 - The site launches the now-infamous "wall" - which allows users to post things and receive messages on their own page.
December 2004 - Facebook hits 1 million users.
May 2005 - Facebook expands to over 800 college campuses.
September 2005 - The site expands to high school networks. It also drops the
"the" to become just "Facebook."
October 2005 - Facebook adds photos and goes international.
December 2005 - Facebook has over 6 million users.
April 2006 - Facebook goes mobile.
September 2006 - Anyone can now join Facebook.
December 2006 - Membership increases to 12 million.
June 2007 - Video launches.
December 2007 - Membership increases to 58 million.
July 2008 - Launch of Facebook for iPhone.
February 2009 - The "like" button is introduced.
July 2010 - Over 500 million users are active on Facebook.
August 2010 - Engineering center is opened in Seattle.
October 2010 - Groups are launched.
April 2011 - Data center opens in Prineville, Oregon.
July 2011 - Video calling is launched.
April 2012 - Acquisition of Instagram is announced.
May 2012 - Facebook releases their IPO - which raised $16
billion and gave the company a $102.4 billion market value.
October 2012 - Membership hits the 1 billion mark.
February 2013 - Acquisition of Atlas is announced.
June 2013 - Facebook's acquisition of Instagram launches video.
Facebook has shaped how we communicate today and how we will communicate in the future. It has been a powerful tool that is used by millions everyday. It has helped formed the concept of social media. There are many positive impacts Facebook has but many negative ones as well. I overall think it is a great invention and has impacted our world for the better, but there are things that need to be fixed or altered. Please read part 2 in the next blog post to hear my opinion on the privacy issues Facebook has constructed!
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