Facebook turns 015: Happy 15th to you

So many scandals have come about since this original posting. From Facebook instigating genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica to Zuckerberg calling Trump after he won 2016 election with plenty more scandals inbetween.  Learn more of Facebook's follies by clicking on New York Intelligencer and also  Wired for more Facebook scandals.

From Facebook's innocent beginnings to it's 15 year milestone, Facebook has had the most scandals of any social media conglomerate.

This article below is a repost of earlier blog posts with link updates in the resources below. 

"I mean there doesn't necessarily have to be more ... I mean like a lot of people are focused on taking over the world. Or doing the most biggest thing. Like getting the most users. I think like part of making a difference and doing something cool is focusing intensely." ~~ Mark Zuckerberg , co-founder, Facebook; As quoted, June 2005 while talking about Facebook before it was famous. See YouTube video below for full discussion.



Facebook Interview Part 2 (2005) , below YouTube Video of interview with Zuckerberg by Derek Franzese 

Facebook that controversial social networking service with media, social, political and cultural implications launched in February 4, 2004,(speculative as some say February 3) and has reached the big 015!

Here are the latest statistics as reported by Facebook:
As of December 2015 there are 1.04 billion daily active users on average with
Facebook reports 934 million mobile daily active users on average for December 2015
There are 1.59 billion monthly active FB users as of December 31, 2015
1.44 billion mobile monthly active users as of December 31, 2015
Approximately 83.6% of FB's daily active users are outside the US and Canada

As of 2015, the company is $300 billion dollars richer since its launch, and there are over 1.55 billion monthly active Facebook users (MAUs) which is a 14 percent increase year over year (Source: Facebook as of 9/30/15). Additionally, according to Zephoria Digital Marketing, of those 1.55 billion MAUs, 1.01 billion people log onto Facebook daily (DAU) for September 2015, which represents a 17% increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 9/30/15) with 4.5 billion likes generated daily as of May 2013 which is a 67 percent increase from August 2012 (Source: Facebook). As of December 2013, Facebook had over 1.23 billion active users, more than 945 million (versus 600 million a year ago) using Facebook on a mobile device. Happy Birthday Facebook! Any Google doodle this year?

From users hover time to determine interest, providing ability for users to choose what they want to see first in their news feeds to live-streaming and messaging application for booking Uber rides, Facebook continues innovating.

In January 2014, chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, clarified: "He [Mark] always said Facebook was started not just to be a company, but to fulfill a vision of connecting the world."

Facebook Inc. began selling stock to the public and trading on the NASDAQ on May 18, 2012. 

Latest Facebook, Inc., Form 8-K (current report filing) from EDGAR® Online here.Not surprising, Facebook is not number 1 in the following 11 countries: Belarus - vk.com; China - qq.com/qzone.qq.com; Kazakhstan - vk.com / odnoklassniki.ru; Moldova - odnoklassniki.ru; Russia - vk.com / odnoklassniki.ru; Ukraine - vk.com; South Korea - qq.com/qzone.qq.com; Uzbekistan - odnoklassniki.ru; Iran - Cloob.com; Vietnam - Zing.vn; North Korea - not available.

Facebook’s major competing social media are as follows: QQ.com; vk.com, odnoklassniki.ru and Zing.vn. Other competitors are mixi in Japan and renren in China.

Based on its 2012 income of US$5 billion, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 list for the first time on the list published in May 2013, being placed at position 462, BusinessInsider.com, Carlson, Nicholas (March 5, 2010) “At Last – A Full Story of How Facebook was Founded http://www.businessinsider.com/how-facebook-was-founded-2010-3#we-can-talk-about-that-after-i-get-all-the-basic-functionality-up-tomorrow-night-1Below the resources section is a chronological timeline that reflects milestones, launches and product information beginning with October 2003 through January 2014.

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, the website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not, and "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person.

With success comes controversy particularly with Facebook. Zuckerberg hacked protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student "facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information), though individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s.

From it’s first 4 hours online, Facemash attracted
450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views.

According to an article from Rolling Stone in July 2008, the site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration.

Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion.

Ultimately, the charges were dropped. For more information visit The Battle of Facebook, Rolling Stone, NY July 2008.

Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.

The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.

Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.

The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California and received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The company dropped “The” from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

Writers for The Wall Street Journal found in 2010 that Facebook apps were transmitting identifying information to "dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies". The apps used an HTTP referrer which exposed the user's identity and sometimes their friends'.

Facebook said, "We have taken immediate action to disable all applications that violate our terms.” Facebook in Privacy Breach, The Wall Street Journal (New York).

In January 2013, the countries with the most Facebook users were:
 FB stats by country, March 3, 2012)
United States with 168.8 million members
Brazil with 64.6 million members
India with 62.6 million members
Indonesia with 51.4 million members
Mexico with 40.2 million members This totals to 309 million members or about 38.6 percent of Facebook's 1 billion worldwide members.
43.1 Million Members of Facebook in Indonesia, Kompas, February 2, 2012.

In regards to Facebook's mobile usage, per an analyst report in early 2013, there are 192 million Android users, 147 million iPhone users, 48 million iPad users and 56 million messenger users


All photos courtesy of Wikimedia and screen shots taken from video and websites. All other photos will be credited as required. 

Additional resources: 
Facebook profile may expose mental illness Fox News
♦ Facebook Banned: 9 Ways To Get Kicked Off The Social Network Huffington Post
♦Facebook Wikipedia
♦ This is The Future of The Facebook ‘News Feed’ Business Insider

Facebook Timeline 
 2003 
 ♦ October 28, 2003: Mark Zuckerberg releases Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook. It was described as a Harvard University version of Hot or Not
2004 
 ♦ January 2004: Zuckerberg begins writing Facebook
♦ January 11, 2004: Zuckerberg registers thefacebook.com domain
♦ February 4, 2004: Zuckerberg launches Facebook
♦ March 2004: Facebook expands to MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and Yale University
♦ April 13, 2004: Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin form Thefacebook.com LLC, a partnership
♦ June 2004: Facebook receives its first investment from Peter Thiel for US$500,000
♦ June 2004: Facebook incorporates into a new company, and Sean Parker (early employee of Napster) becomes its president
♦ June 2004: Facebook moves its base of operations to Palo Alto, California
♦ August 2004: To compete with growing campus-only service i2hub, Zuckerberg launches Wirehog. It is a precursor to Facebook Platform applications
♦ September 2004: ConnectU files a lawsuit against Zuckerberg and other Facebook founders
♦ December 30, 2004: Facebook achieves its one millionth registered user
 2005 
 ♦ May 26, 2005: Accel Partners invests $13 million into Facebook
♦ July 19, 2005: News Corp acquires MySpace, spurring rumors about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company
♦ August 23, 2005: Facebook acquires Facebook.com domain for $200,000
♦ September 2005: Added high school networks[14]
♦ October 2005: Added international school networks and added photos
2006 
 ♦ 2006: A leaked cash flow statement shows that Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million for the 2005 fiscal year
♦ March 28, 2006: A potential acquisition of Facebook is reportedly under negotiations, for $750 million first, then later $2 billion
♦ September 2006: Facebook discusses with Yahoo! about the latter possibly acquiring the former, for $1 billion
♦ September 2006: Facebook launches a high school version of the website
♦ September 26, 2006: Facebook is open to everyone aged 13 and over, and with a valid email address
 2008
♦ June 2008: Facebook settles both lawsuits, ConnectU vs Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg et al. and intellectual property theft, Wayne Chang et al. over The Winklevoss Chang Group's Social Butterfly project. The settlement effectively had Facebook acquiring ConnectU for $20 million in cash and over $1.2 million in shares, valued at $45 million based on $15 billion company valuation
♦ August 2008: Employees reportedly privately sell their shares to venture capital firms, at a company valuation of between $3.75 billion to $5 billion
♦ October 2008: Facebook sets up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland
2009
♦ August 2009: Facebook acquires FriendFeed
♦ September 2009: Facebook claims that it has turned cash flow positive for the first time
2010 
 ♦ February 2010: Facebook acquires Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions
♦ April 2, 2010: Facebook announces the acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvy-shot for an undisclosed amount
 ♦ April 19, 2010: Facebook introduces Community Pages, which are Pages that are populated with articles from Wikipedia
♦ April 21, 2010: Facebook introduces Instant Personalization, starting with Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora
♦ June 2010: Facebook employees sell shares of the company on SecondMarket at a company valuation of $11.5 billion
♦ October 1, 2010: The Social Network, a film about the beginnings of Facebook directed by David Fincher is released. The film is met with widespread critical acclaim as well as commercial success; however, Mark Zuckerberg says that the film is a largely inaccurate account of what happened.
2011 
 ♦ January 2011: $500 million is invested into Facebook for 1% of the company, placing its worth at $50 billion
♦ February 2011: Facebook adds new "civil union" option for gay partnerships
♦ February 2011: Facebook application and content aggregator Pixable estimates that Facebook will host 100 billion photos by summer 2011
♦ June 2011: Facebook partners with Skype to add video chat
♦ September 2011: Facebook partners with Heroku for Facebook application development using the Facebook Platform
♦ September 22, 2011: Facebook launches new UI Timeline in F8 Convention
♦ October 10, 2011: Facebook launches iPad app
♦ December 21, 2011: Facebook log in page changes due to Facebook Timeline addition
♦ December 22, 2011: Facebook launches its new profile user interface, Facebook Timeline.
 2012 
 ♦ April 2012: Facebook acquires picture sharing and social network, Instagram, for $1 billion, the largest acquisition to date
♦ May 2012: Facebook IPO, initial price set at $38 a share, and the stock closed at $38.23 on its first trading day
♦ July 2012: Facebook adds same-sex couples as icons for marriage
♦ August 2012: Facebook forces all remaining users of the old profile style to the new "Timeline" style
♦ October 2012: Total number of Facebook users reaches 1 billion
2013 
 ♦ January 15 :Product - Facebook announces and begins rolling out Facebook Graph Search.
♦ January 30, and April 9: Product - Facebook rolls out detailed and fine-grained emoticons to express different actions and emotional states in one's status updates (experimental launch January 30, official launch with universal availability April 9).
♦ March 7: Product - Facebook announces major planned changes to the News Feed. However, Facebook cancelled these changes after receiving negative feedback from users.
♦ March 8: Acquisitions - Facebook announces that they acquired the team from Storylane, but not the product itself.
♦ April 4 and then April 12 Product (mobile-only) - Facebook launches Facebook Home, a user interface layer for Android-compatible phones that provides a replacement home screen that makes it easier for users to browse and post.[62][63]
♦ April 15: Product - Facebook launches a new timeline.
♦ April-July: Product - Facebook launches Stickers, initially only for its iOS apps in April but later expanding to its web version in July.
♦ June 12, then June 27: Product - Facebook announces support for hashtags, initially only for the web (June 12). Later, more functionality is added and hashtags are extended to the mobile site and apps.
♦ June 30: Political activism - Zuckerberg joins 700 Facebook employees for the June 2013 Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration march in San Francisco, U.S. The 2013 Pride celebration was especially significant, as it followed a Supreme Court of the United States ruling that deemed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional.
 ♦ September 26: Product - Facebook begins letting people edit their posts and comments after publishing.
♦ September 29: Product - Facebook announces that it will begin rolling out Graph Search for posts and comments.
♦ November 13: Acquisition talks - News outlets report that Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion USD but was spurned.
♦ December 18:Financial/legal - Facebook, Zuckerberg, & banks face IPO lawsuit.
2014 
 ♦ January 16: Product - Facebook launches Trending Topics for its web version in the US, UK, Canada, India, and Australia. This is based on feedback to a pilot version tested both on the web and mobile starting August 2013.
 ♦ January 30: Product (mobile-only) Facebook announces Facebook Paper, a separate iOS app that provides a newspaper-like or magazine-like experience for reading on the phone, scheduled for launch on February 3. Facebook also announces Facebook Creative Labs, an intra-company effort to have separate teams working on separate mobile apps that specialize in different facets related to the Facebook experience, rather than trying to make changes to Facebook's main web version, mobile version, or its iOS and Android apps, and says that Facebook Paper is the first product of Facebook Creative Labs. Facebook Paper receives mixed reviews, and some commentators note its similarity with Flipboard.
♦ February 3: Facebook launches Paper. http://www.facebook.com/paper
♦ February 5: Facebook launches Lookback. http://www.facebook.com/lookback
 ♦ February 19:Facebook makes its biggest acquisition, 16 times more than what it paid for Instagram by acquiring WhatsApp, a free text messaging system for $16 billion (spent $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook stock plus another $3 billion of stock over the next four years).
♦ March 3: Rumors are circulated that Facebook is buying drone maker Titan Aerospace for $60 million. It is believed that the acquisition will help bolster Facebook's vision with Internet.org. Later, on April 14, 2014, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is acquiring Titan Aerospace.
 ♦ March 6: Product Facebook announces that it will begin rollout of a somewhat modified news feed. The changes are along the same lines as those announced in the planned revamp announced March 7, 2013 (that was halted), but are more minor and focused.
♦ March 17: Product Facebook's face recognition algorithm (DeepFace) reaches near-human accuracy in identifying faces.
♦ March 25: Facebook announces that it is acquiring Oculus VR, Inc., a leading virtual reality company. The amount is reported to be $2 billion in cash and stock.
♦ March 27 Facebook announces a Connectivity Lab as part of the Internet.org initiative, with the goal of bringing the Internet to everybody via drones, using acqhires from Ascenta.
♦ April 24: Product Facebook announces FB Newswire to help journalists find news news on its website.[145]
♦ April 30: Product, accessibility Facebook launches anonymous login so that people can use apps without giving them their data.
♦ June 18: Product (mobile-only) Facebook releases Facebook Slingshot, an instant messaging software application for sharing photos and videos with friends, for Android and iOS devices.
♦ July 21: Product Facebook launches Save, a read-it-later feature that allows users to save links, places, and media pages for later perusal.
♦ September 15: Userbase/controversy Facebook cracks down on the Facebook profiles of drag queens in San Francisco, asking them to switch to using their real names, and shutting down the accounts of those who refuse to comply.[153] There is considerable pushback, including a planned protest at Facebook headquarters, that is delayed for a meeting with Facebook, but Facebook refuses to budge on its policy. Many people, particularly those in or sympathetic to the LGBTQ community, sign up for competing social network Ello, that does not enforce a real names policy, promises to remain "ad-free and porn-friendly", and aims to have a zero-tolerance policy for hate speech. On October 1, Facebook announced a clarification to its real name policy and said that drag queens could continue operating their accounts. The company clarified that people should use their authentic real-world names but need not use their legal names.
 ♦ October 6: Acquisitions by Facebook Facebook officially completes the acquisition of WhatsApp, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum agrees to match Mark Zuckerberg's $1 salary.[158]
♦ October 23: Product Facebook launches pseudonymous app Rooms, where Facebook users can create and participate in forums on any topic and do not need to use their real names. The forthcoming launch of the pap had been reported on October 7.
♦ October 31: Facebook creates a custom Tor link, making it easier for people to access Facebook anonymously in locations where it is censored.[162][163][164]
♦ November 7: Product Facebook makes it easy for people to unfollow friends and pages they've liked, both while viewing pages in the feed and while reviewing summaries of the most prolific contributors to their feed.[165][166]
♦ December 8: Product Facebook rolls out keyword search for all posts, part of Facebook Graph Search, to all US English users on desktop and using iPhones. It is cited as a potential competitor to Yelp and other product recommendation engines and also as a potential way to surface old, embarrassing posts by people.
♦ December 11: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds his second Q&A, open to the public, about Facebook, where he discusses the dislike button and Facebook's role in promoting viewpoint diversity, helping people share more, and facilitating social and political transparency.
2015 
 ♦ January 5: Acquisitions by Facebook Facebook acquires Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces.
♦ January 8: Acquisitions by Facebook Facebook acquires QuickFire Networks, a company that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news on January 8, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site.
♦ January 16: Open sourcing Facebook open sources the Torch library, containing some of its deep learning tools in machine learning, including new code that runs 23 times as fast for training convolutional neural networks as the fastest publicly available code until that time.
♦ January 20: Product Facebook announces that it will show fewer hoaxes in the news feed, and mark items it identifies as potential hoaxes so that readers can view them more critically.
♦ March 17: Product Facebook introduces a free friend-to-friend payment service within its Messenger app. This is touted by some tech journalists as potential competition for PayPal's Venmo service.
♦ March 25: Product At the first day of the 2015 F8 conference (a conference for Facebook to make announcements about major product and service changes), the company makes a bunch of announcements, with the unifying theme being that the company wants to be an integrated bunch of apps, each fulfilling a somewhat different role. Currently, the company's leading apps include its main app, Messenger, and externally built and acquired apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Specific announcements include making Facebook Messenger more of a platform, a new real-time comments system, embeddable videos, spherical video, Parse for the Internet of Things, updates to ad exchange LiveRail, and analytics for apps.
♦ March 26: Open sourcing Facebook releases its React native framework for building native apps as open source. This is announced on the second day of the F8 conference.
♦ March 31: Userbase, product Facebook launches a feature called Scrapbook that allows parents to give their kids an official presence on Facebook even when they are too young to have their own accounts on the network by tagging them in photos. A Scrapbook can be owned by two people who have indicated to Facebook that they are in a relationship. When the kids grow old enough and get their own accounts, they can take over ownership of the Scrapbook and change the privacy settings thereof.
♦ April 22: Product Facebook launches an Android app called Hello to instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show information about the caller/callee, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call, with initial rollout in the United States, Brazil, and Nigeria. There is no corresponding iOS app, because iOS does not allow apps to interact with phone calls. Commentators compare Facebook Hello to the native Android dialer app[202] and to TrueCaller, an app with crowdsourced data.
♦ April 28 (announcement), April 30 (closure): Product, platform Facebook announces that it is shutting down its friends data API, forcing developers to migrate to the Graph API. The company is also allowing for more granular control of data that users may share with apps.[204][205][206]
♦ May 12: Product Facebook launches "Instant Articles" for Publishers.[207] Publishers who use Instant Articles can opt in to have some of their articles shown to mobile users inside Facebook's app itself, without users having to leave the app and visit the customer's website. Initial launch partners include BuzzFeed, the New York Times, National Geographic and six others. The article as displayed on Facebook mimics the article on the website in terms of layout, and Instant Articles allows for correct attribution and analytics with tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Comscore, in addition to publishers benefiting from Facebook's own analytics. Publishers can choose to have only a subset of their content available as Instant Articles, and Facebook handles the porting of the article to the Instant Article format itself. BuzzFeed praised Facebook for complying with its requests for compatibility with analytics tracking, and said the process was very collaborative throughout. Load times are claimed to be ten times faster than the mobile web. Publishers can keep all the ad revenue if using their own ads, but Facebook gets a 30% cut if the ads are shown by Facebook.
♦ May 29: Product Facebook confirms official support for GIFs. Autoplay settings for GIFs would be the same as those for videos: users who have video autoplay set to on (the default setting) will have GIFs autoplay when they scroll to the GIF in their news feed. Others can play the GIF manually by clicking the GIF button on the feed item with the GIF.
♦ June–August: Product Facebook adds more features for pages to make it easier for businesses to use them. These include: allowing pages to display how quickly they respond to messages, allowing pages to send saved replies to messages, allowing pages to use private messages for customer support, and adding buy button integration to pages.
♦ June–July: Product Facebook makes changes to its news feed algorithm in a few different directions. It relinquishes some control to users allowing them to dictate what they see first in the news feed. Also, it announces that it will start using information on how long people hover on a particular item in their news feed to gauge their level of interest in the item, in addition to the more explicit signals it currently uses (likes, comments, shares).
♦ August 5: Product On Facebook launches live-streaming, initially restricted only to celebrities.Subsequently, on August 12, it announces that the feature will be made available to journalists and those with verified profiles.
♦ August 27: Userbase Facebook announces that it has hit the milestone of 1 billion users accessing it on a single day.
♦ December: Product Facebook announces that it will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps.
2016 
 ♦ January 29: Facebook bans gun sales on Facebook and Instagram (more info at this New York Times article) 


All photos courtesy of Wikimedia and screen shots taken from video and websites. All other photos will be credited as required. 

Resources:
Facebook, The 21 and Counting biggest Facebook Scandals of  2018
Facebook's Year of Scandal, Ranked by How Much You Should Actually Care
History of Facebook: Facts and What's Happening in 2018
Here Are All of Facebook's Scandals, We're Keeping Track So You Don't Have to, Fortune
Facebook, Inc. reports earnings, 2/1/2017 
What to expect when Facebook reports earnings, 2/1/2017
Mark Zuckerberg appears to finally admit Facebook is a media company, The Guardian, December 2016
Who owns Facebook? The Definitive Guide


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