On February 4, 2004, a sophomore at Harvard put a website online. Within a day, between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred people had registered, according to History Hit. That site was thefacebook.com, and the student was Mark Zuckerberg.
Harvard Magazine, in a piece published in August 2026, counted 650 users on the first day. Two weeks later the figure stood at 4,300, a few alumni and even fewer faculty among them. Within a month it had reached Columbia, Stanford and Yale and signed up 10,000 people. Harvard students alone had looked at individual profiles 1.5 million times in under a month.
Not his first try
The idea did not come from nowhere. History Hit notes that Zuckerberg had earlier built Facemash, where students rated one another’s looks. To make it he got into Harvard’s online “facebooks,” the photo directories students used to identify each other. Harvard shut the site down and threatened to expel him over the privacy breach.
The campus already had the concept on paper. “The facebook” was the informal name for the printed register handed to first-years, and the university had planned a digital edition of its own before last-minute privacy worries stalled it. Even Zuckerberg shrugged at the novelty in an instant message quoted by Harvard Magazine, joking about the Winklevoss twins claiming he had stolen “an idea” as if there had been one.
The team and the courtroom
He did not work alone for long. According to History Hit, the team grew to include fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes. Over the next year the site spread to other Ivy League schools, then to every university in the United States and Canada. In August 2005 it became Facebook.com after the address was bought for $200,000. In September 2006 anyone with a registered email address could join.
The fight came early. One week after launch, three Harvard seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, said Zuckerberg had agreed to build a social network called HarvardConnection for them and then used their idea for his own. In 2007 a judge ruled the case too flimsy, finding that casual chat between students was no binding agreement, and the two sides settled.
From a dorm craze to billions of users
The speed rattled some students. Aaron Chadbourne, then active in student politics, told Harvard Magazine he held out over privacy worries, then gave in when everyone else was on it. By month’s end he had 159 friends. Brock Read, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter who covered the site early, recalled students telling him they mostly used it to procrastinate.
History Hit gives 1.18 billion daily active users as of September 2016. Harvard Magazine says Meta, the company Facebook became, is now valued at more than a trillion dollars, with nearly four billion users across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Sources
- When Was Facebook Founded and How Did It Grow so Quickly? | History Hit
- How Facebook Escaped Harvard | Harvard Magazine
