How the World Got Wired · The Social Graph

Thefacebook

A few months after the Facemash incident, in early February of 2004, Zuckerberg launched a different website.

He called it Thefacebook.

The idea behind Thefacebook was much milder than Facemash, but more powerful. Instead of comparing students to each other, Thefacebook let students make their own pages. You logged in with your Harvard email address. You uploaded a picture of yourself. You filled in some basic information — your year at Harvard, your major, your hometown, your favorite books, your relationship status. You connected your page to the pages of friends. You could see your friends’ pages. They could see yours.

It was, in 2004, a brand-new kind of website. There had been a few earlier attempts at “social networks” — a site called Friendster, a site called MySpace, a few others — but Thefacebook had something the others didn’t. It only let in college students. It started at Harvard, then expanded to a few other Ivy League universities, then to all colleges, slowly, one campus at a time. The exclusivity was deliberate. Knowing that everyone on the site was a real student at a real university, who had logged in with their real university email, made people feel safer about putting their actual information on it. Within a few weeks of launching, thousands of Harvard students had signed up. Within months, tens of thousands of students at universities across the country.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard in 2004 to work on the company full time. He moved to Palo Alto, California, with a few co-founders — Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin. They got their first major investor, Peter Thiel, who put $500,000 into the company in exchange for about ten percent of it. (That ten percent would, twenty years later, be worth tens of billions of dollars.) They hired Sean Parker, the co-founder of an earlier internet company called Napster, as their first president.

By 2006, the company had dropped the word “The” from its name. It was now called, simply, Facebook. And in September of that year, it opened its doors. Anyone over the age of 13, anywhere in the world, with any email address, could sign up.

The world started to.

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