On this day – February 4th

Facebook is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California.

The Facebook website was launched on February 4th 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College; within the first month, more than half the undergraduates at Harvard were registered on the service. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to the universities of Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. It later opened to all Ivy League colleges, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada.

In mid-2004, entrepreneur Sean Parker – an informal advisor to Zuckerberg – became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California. It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2005, the company dropped "the" from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for US$200,000.

In September 2006 Facebook was opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address. In late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages (pages which allowed companies to promote themselves and attract customers). These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned.

On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion. Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international advertisements on the social networking site.

Facebook's market dominance has led to international media coverage and significant reporting of its shortcomings. Notable issues include Internet privacy, such as its widespread use of a "like" button on third-party websites tracking users, possible indefinite records of user information, automatic facial recognition software, and its role in the workplace, including employer-employee account disclosure. The use of Facebook can have psychological effects, including feelings of jealousy and stress, a lack of attention, and social media addiction, in some cases comparable to drug addiction.

Facebook's company tactics have also received prominent coverage, including tax avoidance, real-name user requirement policies, censorship, and its involvement in the United States PRISM surveillance program. Facebook also disclosed that it sold ads to a Russian Spy Agency-linked company during the 2016 United States presidential election.

For the first time in its history, in January 2018, Facebook reported that it had experienced a net loss of active users within its most valuable market – North America. Facebook's daily active user base in the U.S. and Canada fell in the final quarter of 2017, dropping to 184 million from 185 million.

A 2016 study at Oxford University looked in to the relationships people typically have with those in their Friend list. Today's questions is this:

On average, what percentage of people's Friends list are actually real-life friends?

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.