Facebook began at Harvard University in 2003 as Face mash, an online platform called "Hot or No” game that students used to judge the attractiveness of two female students using their pictures side by side.

However, it was shut down after two days because Mark Zuckerberg, the platform’s developer who was in his second year of college had violated university policies in acquiring resources for the service. However, in those two days, 450 people had voted 22,000 times and that success prompted Zuckerberg to register the URL as a social network in January 2004 as theFacebook.com.

Harvard students who signed up for the social network, writes brandwidth.com, could post photographs of themselves and personal information about their lives. Its popularity scaled up when students from other Ivy league universities like Yale and Stanford chipped in and by June 2004, more than 250,000 students from 34 schools had already signed up and in that same year, giant business companies like MasterCard started playing exposure for the site.

By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users but was still lagging behind Myspace which had boasted five million members, according to Brotannica.com.

In 2005, the site introduced more settings like tagging and uploading an unlimited number of photos which attracted universities outside the US to sign up for the website and by the year’s end; it had six million monthly users.

In 2006, Facebook opened its membership to anyone above 13, and in two years, it had surpassed Myspace as the most-visited social media website globally. 

In February 2012, the American company became a public company and had a market value of $102.4 billion.