Facebook turns 10: all major updates in the last 10 years

The social media behemoth frequented by 17% of Earth’s human population celebrated its 10th birthday on February 4th, 2014. With an exorbitant 1.23 billion active users on a monthly basis and 757 million daily, the mogul is worth a whopping $135 billion and may be one of the fastest growing companies to reach $150 billion. It has undergone a multitude of changes since it was first conceived in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room ― changes which allowed the site to dwarf its competition either through acquisition or innovation.

A timeline of major feature updates
• February 2004: Facebook launches as a Harvard-only social network for rating the attractiveness of peers. Hundreds of students join within hours. Zuckerberg is nearly expelled.

• March 2004: The phenomenon eclipses other Ivy League universities including: Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. 800 colleges join the network within a year. Facebook distinguished itself from other social media due to its clean layout,college student exclusivity, and non-existent spam.

• September 2005: The domain name “TheFacebook.com” is purchased for $200,000. A high school version of the network opens.

A Facebook group page from 2005

• October 2005: Facebook launches its photo application, notable at the time for its unlimited picture storage. By 2008 there are 10 billion photos uploaded.

• April 26, 2006: Facebook for Mobile launches, Zuckerberg gears the company for the mobile market. The first iPhone app follows suite in 2008 with its Android version in 2009.

• October 24, 2007: Microsoft purchases 1.6% of Facebook for $240 million. The company is officially valued at $15 billion.

• January 5. 2008: Facebook hosts a Republican presidential debate in partnership with NBC.

• April 9, 2012: The dent caused by the competing photo-sharing app Instagram is recognized.
Facebook acquired the company for $1 billion in stock and cash.

• May 18, 2012: Facebook goes public with its IPO and stock prices initially valued at $45 a share drop to $38 by the end of the same day. Prices further plunge to an all-time low of $17.58 a share by September 2012. Today it values at $62.22 a share.

On the decline?
Social media outlets are trendy and often subjected to waxing and waning public interest depending on what’s the latest and greatest platform available. If the latest studies are to be believed, than Facebook, like MySpace and Friendster before it, has already reached its zenith. According to the digital agency iStrategylabs, Facebook’s own social advertising data reveals that three million teenagers have left Facebook in the last three years.

The findings of another research firm, Pew Internet Centre, mimic similar sentiments ― there is a 25% decline amongst younger users, particularly teenagers. Pew speculates that this is attributed to their disapproval of sharing the same digital space as their parents. It observed that as Facebook is getting older, so too has its core audience has gotten; there is an 80% increase in users age 55 or above. Teens are migrating in droves to WhatsApp and Snapchat.

Facebook’s stance
To a large extent, Facebook’s robustness is a direct result of paying close attention to emerging social media trends, and innovating to embrace those trends ― or simply buying out your competition. When pressed for his opinion on the matter, a smiling Zuckerberg tells NCB’s Today show that “one of the big things that I've taken away from the last 10 years is, there's always a next move and you just need to keep on pushing forward and keep on doing the best thing that you can.” In spite of Zuckerberg’s confidence, Facebook is taking the declining teenage audience seriously enough to have reportedly offered $3 billion in cash to purchase Snapchat earlier this fall.

Taking responsibility
Facebook has not yet established any legal framework for what it does with all the information collected from the vast number of people using the service worldwide. Does it sell it off to the CIA or other intelligence agencies from a user’s respective country? There are enough people arrested and convicted in foreign countries of limited political freedom for posts they make on Facebook to insinuate that their governments must’ve obtained that information somehow.

Story via Yahoo,BBC, and Businessweek