Highs and lows as the social media giant reaches an important milestone.<\/p>\n
Created by a group of friends in a college dorm room, Facebook first went online fifteen years ago this week.<\/p>\n
It may seem to some of us like a lifetime ago.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s next to impossible that even a visionary like co-founder Mark Zuckerberg could have foreseen the impact – and controversy – that the experiment originally known as \u201cFacemash\u201d would have on our lives and the world around us.<\/p>\n
Starting out as an online network linking students of Yale, Columbia, and Stanford, the site would go on to attract over 2 billion active users who use it for everything from getting back in touch with old friends to organizing events, searching for work, and documenting their own life story.<\/p>\n
In 2004, Zuckerberg left Harvard to work on Facebook full-time from a rented house in Palo Alto, California.<\/p>\n
These fast-moving and turbulent early days of the company are brilliantly documented in the 2010 hit film \u201cThe Social Network.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n By September 2004, Facebook had 1 million active users. The following year, Zuckerberg turned down a $1 billion bid from Yahoo to acquire the project.<\/p>\n With $16 billion raised when Facebook finally went public in 2012, he was undoubtedly right to do so. Last year, the company boasted gross revenue of $40.7 billion and total assets of $84.6 billion.<\/p>\n Yet more recently, Facebook has become mired in controversy following complaints over user privacy and its murky role in the 2016 US election.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the site appears to be bleeding users with Pew research<\/a> claiming that 42% of users stepped back from daily engagement last year.<\/p>\n