Today Facebook turns 18 and even if the moment is not the best, the task of this Almanac is to remember what happened on February 4, 2004. Thefacebook.com site goes online: it was registered three weeks earlier, when the founders had decided that the name Facemash, with which he was launched among the students of Harvard University, for several reasons could not work.
Mark Zuckerberg, who at the time was 19 and a Harvard student, was the leader of the project but he was not alone: with him there were – and therefore can boast the title of co-founders -: Dustin Moskovitz, 17, who thanks to the shares he still has of Facebook he broke the record for the youngest billionaire in history; Eduardo Saverin, born in Brazil, lives in Singapore where he moved to avoid paying taxes in the US; Andrew McCollum, 21, at the time the largest of the group, left the startup as early as 2007 and dedicated himself to several minor projects; finally Chris Hughes, his idea of opening Facebook to all schools, left the company in 2008 to support Obama’s presidential campaign, then unsuccessfully attempted the adventure of journalism and finally lined up recently for the break -up of Facebook, its separation from Instagram and Whatsapp.
In short, there were five students, between 17 and 21 years old, they were about to conquer the world and they didn’t know it. The first version of their project, Facemash, was a game that allowed users to compare official photos of Harvard students and vote “hot” and “not”. In the first hours Facemash attracted 450 users by collecting over twenty thousand page views. But the success did not last long. The photos had technically been stolen online from university servers by Zuckerberg who risked expulsion (as well as a series of charges for serious crimes). But Zuckerberg didn’t stop and changed the nature of the project.
On February 4th 2004 with the launch of Thefacebook there was already the idea that that thing could evolve into a social network. The first homepage already had the typical blue we know and the fonts were the same too. At the top left was the image of a boy: there was some discussion about who he was, someone hypothesized Al Pacino as a young man and instead it turned out that he was Peter Wolf, an American musician and singer. The text said:
«Welcome to Thefacebook – Thefacebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges. We have opened up Thefacebook for popular consumption at Harvard University. You can use Thefacebook to: search for people at your school; find out who are in your classes; look up your friends’ friends; see a visualization of your social network. To get started, click below to register. If you have alredy registered, you can log in.»
The “The” from the name will be removed in August 2005 and the following year the service will be open to all users with at least 13 years of age and a valid email address. Soon we would have signed up in many, almost two billion.