| Status | Privately Held |
| Website | facebook.com |
| Blog | blog.facebook.com |
| Category | Web |
| Address |
156 University Avenue Palo Alto, CA, 94301 USA |
| Employees | 450 |
| Founded | 2/04 |
| Total | $393M |
| Angel, 9/04 2 Peter Thiel | $500k |
| Series A, 5/05 3 Accel Partners | $12.7M |
| Series B, 4/06 4 Greylock Meritech Capital Partners Peter Thiel | $25M |
| Series C, 10/07 5 Microsoft Li Ka-shing Marc Samwer Oliver Samwer Alexander Samwer | $300M |
| Series C, 3/08 6 Li Ka-shing | $40M |
| Series C, 1/08 7 European Founders Fund European Founders Fund | $15M |
On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit, in 2 weeks, half of the student body at Harvard had signed up. Other schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term Facebook came from Zuckerberg’s high school (Phillips Exeter Academy). The Exeter Face Book was passed around to every student as a way for students to get to know their classmates for the following year. It was a physical paper book until Zuckerberg brought it to the internet.
With this success, Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and Hughes moved out to Palo Alto for the summer and rented a sublet. A few weeks later, Zuckerberg ran into the former cofounder of Napster, Sean Parker. Parker soon moved in to Zuckerberg’s apartment and they began working together. Parker provided the introduction to their first investor, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of the Founders Fund. Thiel invested $500,000 into Facebook.
With millions more users, Friendster attempted to acquire the company for $10 million in mid 2004. Facebook turned down the offer and subsequently received $12.7 million in funding from Accel Partners, at a valuation of around $100 million. Facebook continued to grow, opening up to high school students in September 2005 and adding an immensely popular photo sharing feature the next month. The next spring, Facebook received $25 million in funding from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, as well as previous investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. The pre-money valuation for this deal was about $525 million. Facebook subsequently opened up to work networks, eventually amassing over 20,000 work networks. Finally in September 2006, Facebook opened to anyone with an email address.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo attempted to acquire the company for $1 billion dollars. Reports actually indicated that Zuckerberg made a verbal agreement to sell Facebook to Yahoo!. A few days later when Yahoo!’s stock price took a dive, the offer was lowered to $800 million and Zuckerberg walked away from the deal. Yahoo! later offered $1 billion again, this time Zuckerberg turned Yahoo! down and earned instant notoriety as the “kid” who turned down a billion. This was not the first time Zuckerberg turned down an acquisition offer; Viacom had previously unsuccessfully attempted to acquire the company for $750 million in March, 2006.
One sour note for Facebook has been the controversy with social network Uconnect. The founders of Uconnect, former classmates of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, allege that Zuckerberg stole their original source code for Facebook. The ordeal has gone to court, but is still unresolved.
Notwithstanding this lingering controversy, Facebook’s growth in the fall of 2007 was staggering. Over 1 million new users signed up every week, 200,000 daily, totaling over 50 million active users. Facebook received 40 billion page views a month. Long gone were the days of Facebook as a social network for college students. 11% of users are over the age of 35, and the fastest growing demographic is users over 30. Facebook has also seen huge growth internationally; 15% of the user base is in Canada. Facebook users’ passion, or addiction, to the site is unparalleled: more than half use the product every single day and users spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook. Facebook is 6th most trafficked site in the US and top photo sharing site with 4.1 billion photos uploaded.
Based on these types of numbers, Microsoft invested $240 million into Facebook for 1.6 percent of the company in October 2007. This meant a valuation of over $15 billion, making Facebook the 5th most valuable US Internet company, yet with only $150 million in annual revenue. Many explained Microsoft’s decision as being solely driven by the desire to outbid Google.
Facebook’s competitors include MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Piczo, and Open Social.
Robert Scoble’s video from www.podtech.net/scobleshow:
| Website | www.facebook.com/apps/applicatio... |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | April, 2008 |
Facebook Chat is a service which provides a new way to communicate with your friends real-time. Chat allows more immediacy than The Wall and Inbox the other ways of keeping up with friends. No installation or assembly is required. The messages are delivered and displayed to your friend as soon as they are sent. You can also collapse conversations to get them out of the way and go offline if you do not want to use chat at all.
| Website | Facebook.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | September 5, 2006 |
| Tags | social-networking |
Facebook’s most controversial feature launch was the News Feed, a bulletin on users’ home pages that automatically broadcasts their friends’ most important activities. Days after the feature debuted on September 5, 2006, hundreds of thousands of Facebook users created groups protesting the News Feed because they felt it was displaying their information without permission. Ironically, all information on Facebook was entered manually by users and available for only their friends to see, but many felt there was a certain “stalker” element to the News Feed. As many bloggers began decrying that Facebook’s decision would lead to their demise, news crews camped outside the Facebook offices eager to see what would happen next.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg ultimately wrote a personal letter to all users indicating that Facebook would be adding privacy settings. Since then, News Feed has been an incredible success, with page views skyrocketing since its introduction. The entire fiasco could be viewed as a success, garnering Facebook an incredible amount of press and showing the power of social networks to galvanize support for a cause. Ironically, in this case, the cause was for the removal of a Facebook feature.
| Website | developers.facebook.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | May 24, 2007 |
| Tags | ad-supported-software, social-networking |
Facebook announced the deployment of the Facebook Platform during the f8 conference on May 24, 2007. Facebook initially included 85 applications in the deployment. The platform and its apps became an instant hit. For example, the photo editing application Picnik added 100,000 users in the first 3 days. Meanwhile, hundreds of developers rushed to create Facebook apps for the masses of Facebook users. The most popular apps included iLike, TopFriends, and Graffiti. Users learned about new apps on their News Feeds which published stories when friends added apps. Many applications saw such fast and unexpected growth that their servers died out. Another advantage for developers was that they could place ads on their Facebook application and collect all of the money earned.
While all numbers indicate that the Facebook Platform has been a huge hit, there has also been some criticism. With time, many began to criticize Facebook’s platform for having too many frivolous apps. Some doubted whether it was such a great distribution tool after all. As of October 2007 there were over 6500 applications, but only the top 3 apps, TopFriends, FunWall, and Super Wall have over 1,000,000 active users, and only 58 apps have over 100,000 users. Additionally, 6 of the top 10 are created by Slide and RockYou. Another criticism was that many apps were abusing the platform through tricky spamming methods. Facebook has begun to close up some of these holes. A couple other criticisms of the platform were scalability issues and that developers must use the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for the front end design, as opposed to the ubiquitous HTML.
