Facebook launches
On this day · 4 February 2004
From a Harvard dorm room, a 19-year-old switched on a student directory that would grow into the world's largest social network.
On 4 February 2004, a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg opened a web service called thefacebook.com for students at his university. He built and ran it from his Kirkland House dorm room with four classmates, on a single rented server costing about $85 a month.
The idea was modest: an online directory where Harvard students entered their own photos and details and browsed their peers. It spread instantly. Within roughly a day, hundreds had signed up; within weeks, thousands; and inside a month, much of the undergraduate body had joined.
What began as a campus address book would within years connect more than a billion people worldwide.
That spring the service jumped to other Ivy League schools and beyond, the company moved to California, and in 2005 it dropped the ‘the’ to become simply Facebook. A dorm-room experiment had quietly become the seed of modern social media.
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