Facebook is celebrating its eighth birthday with now estimated 845 million active users.The popular social networking site is anticipated to have one billion users by August this year and has changed the lives of how people communicate . It has witnessed tremendous growth since its launch on February 4 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg in the dorm room at Harvard University .
While Mark Zuckerberg, Chief Executive of the company is known as the man who built the social networking site there are three more co-founders; Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes who were all room mates and students at Harvard. The four founders initially buit the networking site for Harvards students only but then was soon expanded to other colleges and eventually added support for students at various other universities.Before its public lauch it was named as ‘thefacebook.com’ but on the 4th of February 2008 Mark Zuckerberg renamed to ‘facebook’ the domain name used now.
It is now difficult to think of a life without Facebook status updates, friend requests, relationship statuses or photo tags.The company’s founder Zuckerberg is in the list of top and youngest millionaires and also helped a lot of start-ups, non profits and other companies grow, interact and increase sales. In April 2010 Social Media Today reported that an approximately 41.6 per cent of the US population had a Facebook account. However, company’s market growth has begun to stall in some region, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.The company has filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012.
