Zuckerberg Launching Facebook: February 4, 2004 Friends in an Unfriendly World?

When Time magazine named you as the Person of the Year in 2005, the biggest endorsement was given to the rise of the social networking phenomenon which saw its rise and rise throughout the decade. People, eager to express individuality and creativity, created public pages with little to no HTML writing experience under websites like Friendster, MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, Twitter, and Facebook. Each of the sites allowed users to post and share photos, blogs, comments, and make friends. Facebook is currently the largest social networking site on the web, with Twitter emerging as something quicker and edgier. However, have all these made the world a more friendly place? Not really, considering that a global survey in 2009 found unfriend as the most popular word.

Being dumped by his girlfriend Erica prompted Mark Zuckerberg to invent a social networking site called Facemash from his Harvard dorm on February 4, 2004, which rated women in the campus as whether hot or not. Facemash became Facebook following a few modifications with the idea coming from his days at Phillips Exeter Academy which had a long-standing tradition of publishing an annual student directory with headshot photos of all students, faculty and staff known as the Facebook. Zuckerbergs Facebook started off as just a Harvard-thing, until he decided to spread it to Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and others. Finally, he moved to Palo Alto and over the summer of 2004, Facebook was launched as a corporate entity. The social networking revolution was also born.

After several lawsuits by his co-founders, in 2007 Facebook sold 1.6% stake to Microsoft for $240 mn. With over 450 mn users Facebook is the face of social networkinga bestseller detailing the fallout of Zuckerberg and the co-founders is already on the stands, while a biopic has also released. If Facebook is the face of social networking, then Twitter is its biggest facial adornment. In Oakland in 2000, Jack Dorsey started his company to dispatch couriers, taxis, and emergency services from the Web. Building on dispatching and inspired in part by LiveJournal and possibly by AOL Instant Messenger, he got the idea at this time for real-time status communication. He decided that SMS text suited the status message idea better and built a prototype for Twitter in 2 weeks. He co-founded Obvious, a podcasting startup which then spun off into Twitter. As CEO, Dorsey saw the startup through 2 rounds of VC fundingthough improving uptime was initially given more priority over generating revenues, considering its universal popularity now Twitter is looking at channels to monetize it now.