With the recent flotation and the legal battles of The Social Network movie, it's easy to miss the real story behind Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook eight years ago as a university network at Harvard but, today, 13% of the world's population have signed up to his website. And now he's listed on the Stock Exchange in a deal reported to be worth $100 billion.
But for him, it is clearly about more than the money. He has given everyone a platform to share and follows what he preaches on his own Facebook page. The development of FB is directly related to the growth of people's desire to share, which clearly becomes addictive.
However, the unprecedented user growth cannot go on forever so now they need to offer people more reasons to use the site for longer and more often. They want to make the time you spend there so valuable that you want to keep coming back every day. So now we see games and apps, as well as business brands.
Although studying psychology and computer science at Harvard, Zuckerberg was always more interested in making a social network for the internet and had been involved in a project at High School which put the names and faces of students onto the school website. He recalled dreaming about being able to share experiences on the internet but always thought someone else would do it.
Curiously, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg were both taught by the same professor at Harvard. Harry Lewis said that Zuck was eager to learn but, like Gates before him, he was very sceptical as to whether what they were teaching him was what he needed to be learning. He absorbed but didn't pay full attention at the same time.
The Face Book was a printed album of student's photos and details. As is seen in the film, Zuckerberg and his friends came up with a prank which would use this information to make a website which would compare the looks of the various students. It was called the Face Mash and caused a furor because he hacked into the college database to populate all the images. It was the most used site on campus on that Sunday afternoon but privacy issues forced them to take it down and also delayed the launch of the official Harvard campus website.
However, Mark Zuckerberg was not listening and launched his own version of thefacebook, getting round the privacy laws by inviting people to post their own information. It was a huge success within its first week and it was not long before other colleges wanted to have facebooks at their schools too.
Whilst there were student sites at many colleges across America and a number of other popular social networks at the time - Myspace, Friends Reunited and friendster - Zuckerberg's experience in psychology and computer science meant that Facebook became a technology company which designed social products and that creativity is what has made him and his company unique.
But where there is creativity, there also tends to be legal disputes over ideas and the case of the Winklevoss twins was eventually settled for $65 million with Zuckerberg still denying their claims that he stole their idea.
With its simple design and Zuckerberg's determination never to let it crash, the Facebook became very popular in those early days and in the summer vacation he moved to California, renting a small house in Silicon Valley for himself and some friends and they all hung out and worked on the project and started getting recognition in the media.
By the autumn, the Facebook had reached 200k users and required lots more bandwidth, so he pitched for and won an investment of $500k from nearby venture capitalists. The 'the' was dropped and so Facebook.com was born.
In 2005, they had achieved a million users and in 2006, Zuckerberg turned down an offer from Yahoo to sell the network for $1bn. Despite pressure from his friends and colleagues to accept, he declined and, instead, opened Facebook to anyone with an email address, resulting in an additional 50k new users joining every day.
In 2007 Microsoft offered $15bn and Zuck turned that down as well.
Zuckerberg said the hardest one to turn down was the Yahoo $1bn one and many of his co-workers who were not into it for the long term left in disappointment. But he held his nerve and continued to grow his dedicated team, whilst keeping the profits in house.
When the 100 million users mark was reached, he realised that he needed to find a way to make money from the audience he had built. He poached Sheryl Sandberg, a senior advertising executive from Google. She knew AdWords and could show him how to move into this lucrative area.
And so advertising started to appear on Facebook... and the rest, as they say, is history.
Whether you need a basic Welcome To Facebook guide or the answer to the question How Does Twitter Work, Lollipop Local give simple, clear instructions about how to use these new technologies to get more customers.
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