February 6, 2009 by Matt Thomas
Hugely popular social networking site, Facebook turned five on Wednesday. Considering the growth of the platform from student experiment to the point where it’s by far the most popular of all the social networking sites, it’s kind of hard to believe it’s been around for such a short period of time. The site is not just one of the greatest success stories in the history of the Internet but in the history of business generally. With that in mind, and to mark the occasion, we decided to give you a run-down of exactly how Facebook took over the world.
The original Facebook was the product of several all nighters at Harvard University on the part of Mark Zuckerberg and friends. Back then it was known as TheFacebook and, contrary to popular belief, was far from unique – colleges and universities across the US were creating their own systems similar to Facebook as a way of moving their large paper based student directories online. Many students were also trying to better their colleges attempts by designing their own systems. Zuckerberg wasn’t even the only person at Harvard doing it.
The reason Facebook succeeded where all the others failed was mainly that it was much simpler – it was and remains a very intuitive system that takes seconds to get to grips with.
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