Читать книгу Facebook For Dummies - Carolyn Abram - Страница 24

In ye olden days, say, the early 2000s, most college freshmen would receive a thinly bound book containing the names and faces of everyone in their matriculating class. These face books were useful for matching names to the students seen around campus or for pointing out particular people to friends. However, these face books had several problems. If someone didn’t send in his picture, the books were incomplete. They were outdated by junior year because many people looked drastically different, and the books didn’t reflect the students who had transferred in or who were from any other class. Finally, they had little information about each person.

In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore at Harvard, launched an online “book” to which people could upload their photos and personal information, a service that solved many of these problems. Within a month, more than half of the Harvard undergraduates had signed up.

Zuckerberg was then joined by others to help expand the site into other schools. Carolyn was the first Stanford student to receive an account. During the summer of the same year, Facebook moved to Palo Alto, California, where the site and the company kept growing. By December 2004, the site had grown to one million college students. Every time Facebook opened to a new demographic — high school, then work users, then everyone — the rate at which people joined the site continued to increase.

At the end of 2006, the site had more than 10 million users; 2007 closed out with more than 50 million active users. At the time of this book’s publication in 2021, that final count has grown so that now more than two and a half billion people across the globe use Facebook to stay in touch.