History of Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004. It was 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 gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 and older.
created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room
FaceMash
FaceMash, Facebook's predecessor, opened in 2003, developed by Mark Zuckerberg; he wrote the software for the Facemash website when he was in his second year of college. The website was set up as a type of "hot or not" game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two female student pictures side by side and let them decide who was more attractive.While writing the software, Mark Zuckerberg wrote the following blog entries:
According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash 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". Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.
The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final exam. He uploaded art images to a website, each of which was featured with a corresponding comments section, then shared the site with his classmates, and people started sharing notes.
On October 25, 2010, entrepreneur and banker Rahul Jain auctioned off FaceMash.com to an unknown buyer for $30,201.
Zuckerberg also stated his intention to create a universal website that could connect people around the university. According to his roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, "When Mark finished the site, he told a couple of friends... then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which was... three hundred people." Moskovitz continued to say that, "By the end of the night, we were... actively watching the registration process. Within twenty-four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants."
Just six days after the launch of the site, three Harvard University seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their idea to build a competing product. The three complained to the Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. Zuckerberg knew about the investigation so he used TheFacebook.com to find members in the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a history of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to log in, Zuckerberg tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was successful in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg which was later settled.
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard University. Within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service. Zuckerberg was joined in the promotion of the site by Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston-area schools. It gradually reached most universities in the United States and Canada. Facebook was incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. The company dropped 'The' from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.
By December 2005, Facebook had 6 million users.
On October 1, 2005, Facebook expanded to twenty-one universities in the United Kingdom and others around the world. Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. On December 11, 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to 2,000+ colleges and 25,000+ high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone aged 13 and older with a valid email address.
Late in 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages, allowing companies to attract potential customers and tell about themselves. These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned.
In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
In 2010, Facebook began to invite users to become beta testers after passing a question-and-answer-based selection process, and a set of Facebook Engineering Puzzles where users would solve computational problems which gave them an opportunity to be hired by Facebook.
As of February 2011, Facebook had become the largest online photo host, being cited by Facebook application and online photo aggregator Pixable as expecting to have 100 billion photos by summer 2011. As of October 2011, over 350 million users accessed Facebook through their mobile phones, accounting for 33% of all Facebook traffic.
On March 12, 2012, Yahoo! filed suit in a U.S. federal court against Facebook weeks before the scheduled Facebook initial public offering. In its court filing, Yahoo! said that Facebook had infringed on ten of its patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking. Yahoo! had threatened to sue Facebook a month before the filing, insisting that the social network license its patents. A spokesperson for Facebook issued a statement saying "We're disappointed that Yahoo, a long-time business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation". The lawsuit claims that Yahoo!'s patents cover basic social networking ideas such as customizing website users' experiences to their needs, adding that the patents cover ways of targeting ads to individual users. In 2012, Facebook App Center, an online mobile store, was rolled out. The store initially had 500 Facebook apps which were mostly games.
On April 24, 2014, Facebook and Storyful announced a new feature called FB Newswire.
Financials
Initial funding
Facebook was initially incorporated as a Florida LLC. For the first few months after its launch in February 2004, the costs for the website operations for thefacebook.com were paid for by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, who had taken equity stakes in the company. The website also ran a few advertisements to meet its operating costs.First angel investment
In the summer of 2004, venture capitalist Peter Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in the social network Facebook for 10.2% of the company and joined Facebook's board. This was the first outside investment in Facebook.In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick outlines the story of how Thiel came to make his investment: former Napster and Plaxo employee Sean Parker, who at the time had assumed the title of "President" of Facebook, was seeking investors for Facebook. Parker approached Reid Hoffman, the CEO of work-based social network LinkedIn. Hoffman liked Facebook but declined to be the lead investor because of the potential for conflict of interest with his duties as LinkedIn CEO. He redirected Parker to Peter Thiel, whom he knew from their PayPal days. Thiel met Parker and Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard college student who had founded Facebook and controlled it. Thiel and Zuckerberg got along well and Thiel agreed to lead Facebook's seed round with $500,000 for 10.2% of the company. Hoffman and Mark Pincus also participated in the round, along with Maurice Werdegar who led the investment on behalf of Western Technology Investment. The investment was originally in the form of a convertible note, to be converted to equity if Facebook reached 1.5 million users by the end of 2004. Although Facebook narrowly missed the target, Thiel allowed the loan to be converted to equity anyway. Thiel said of his investment:
I was comfortable with them pursuing their original vision. And it was a very reasonable valuation. I thought it was going to be a pretty safe investment."
Accel investment (Series A)
In April 2005, Accel Partners agreed to make a $12.7 million venture capital investment in a deal that valued Facebook at $98 million. Accel joined Facebook's board, and the board was expanded to five seats, with Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Breyer in three of the seats, and the other two seats currently being empty but with Zuckerberg free to nominate anybody to those seats.Greylock investment (Series B)
In April 2006, Facebook closed its Series B funding round. This included $27.5 million from a number of venture capitalists, including Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, plus additional investments from Peter Thiel and Accel Partners. The valuation for this round was about $500 million.A leaked cash flow statement showed that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net gain of $5.66 million.
Sales negotiations
With the sale of social networking website MySpace to News Corp on July 19, 2005, rumours surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. Zuckerberg had already stated that he did not want to sell the company, and denied rumors to the contrary. On March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a potential acquisition of Facebook was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high as $2 billion.In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place concerning acquisition of Facebook, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion. Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic audience.
On July 17, 2007, Zuckerberg said that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, saying "We're not really looking to sell the company... We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company." In September 2007, Microsoft approached Facebook, proposing an investment in return for a 5% stake in the company, offering an estimated $300–500 million. That month, other companies, including Google, expressed interest in buying a portion of Facebook.
Microsoft investment (Series C)
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion. However, Microsoft bought preferred stock that carried special rights, such as "liquidation preferences" that meant Microsoft would get paid before common stockholders if the company were sold. Microsoft's purchase also included the right to place international ads on Facebook. In November 2007, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook., Palo Alto, California. In January 2012 the company moved to a new campus in Menlo Park, California.
Switch to profitability
In August 2008, BusinessWeek reported that private sales by employees, as well as purchases by venture capital firms, were being done at share prices that put the company's total valuation at between $3.75 billion and $5 billion. In October 2008, Zuckerberg said "I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did... In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is. But that is not our primary focus today."Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg as its Chief Operating Officer in March 2008. Sandberg is reported to have held a number of brainstorming sessions with Facebook employees on their long-term monetization strategy, which led to the conclusion that advertising would be the main source of monetization. Under Sandberg's leadership, Facebook made a number of changes to its advertising model with the aim of achieving profitability. In September 2009, Facebook stated that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time.
In early 2012, Facebook disclosed that its profits had jumped 65% to $1 billion in the previous year when its revenue, which is mainly from advertising, had jumped almost 90% to $3.71 billion. Facebook also reported that 56% of its advertising revenue comes from the U.S. alone, and that 12% of its revenue comes from Zynga, the social network game development company. Payments and other fees were $557 million up from $106 million the previous year.
Acquisitions
In August 2009, Facebook acquired social media real-time news aggregator FriendFeed, a startup created by Gmail's first engineer Paul Buchheit.In February 2010, Facebook acquired Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions. On April 2, 2010, Facebook announced acquisition of a photo-sharing service called Divvyshot for an undisclosed amount. In June 2010, an online marketplace for trading private Facebook stock reflected a valuation of $11.5 billion.
On April 12, 2012, Facebook acquired photo sharing service Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.
On March 8, 2013, Facebook announced that they acquired the team from Storylane, but not the product itself. On October 13, 2013, Facebook acquired Onavo, an Israeli analytics company, for approximately $120 million.
On February 19, 2014, Facebook announced its acquisition of WhatsApp, a smartphone instant messaging application for $19 billion in a mix of stock and cash. The acquisition is the most ever paid for a venture-capital backed startup.
On March 25, 2014, Facebook announced they had acquired virtual reality startup Oculus VR for $2 billion in cash and stock.
In April 2020, Facebook, Inc. bought a 9.9% stake in Jio, which was the highest foreign direct investment in the Indian technology sector.
Initial public offering
Facebook filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012. The preliminary prospectus stated that the company was seeking to raise $5 billion. The document announced that the company had 845 million active monthly users and its website featured 2.7 billion daily likes and comments. After the IPO, Zuckerberg retains a 22% ownership share in Facebook and owns 57% of the voting shares.Underwriters valued the shares at $38 each, pricing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly public company. On May 16, one day before the IPO, Facebook announced that it would sell 25% more shares than originally planned due to high demand. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history. The stock price left the company with a higher market capitalization than all but a few U.S. corporations – surpassing heavyweights such as Amazon.com, McDonald's, Disney, and Kraft Foods – and made Zuckerberg's stock worth $19 billion. The New York Times stated that the offering overcame questions about Facebook's difficulties in attracting advertisers to transform the company into a "must-own stock". Jimmy Lee of JPMorgan Chase described it as "the next great blue-chip". Writers at TechCrunch, on the other hand, expressed skepticism, stating, "That's a big multiple to live up to, and will likely need to add bold new revenue streams to justify the mammoth valuation".
Trading in the stock, which began on May 18, was delayed that day due to technical problems with the NASDAQ exchange. The stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, forcing underwriters to buy back shares to support the price. At closing bell, shares were valued at $38.23, only $0.23 above the IPO price and down $3.82 from the opening bell value. The opening was widely described by the financial press as a disappointment.
The stock nonetheless set a new record for trading volume of an IPO. On May 25, 2012, the stock ended its first full week of trading at $31.91, a 16.5% decline.
On 22 May, regulators from Wall Street's Financial Industry Regulatory Authority announced that they had begun to investigate whether banks underwriting Facebook had improperly shared information only with select clients, rather than the general public. Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin subpoenaed Morgan Stanley over the same issue. The allegations sparked "fury" among some investors and led to the immediate filing of several lawsuits, one of them a class action suit claiming more than $2.5 billion in losses due to the IPO. Bloomberg estimated that retail investors may have lost approximately $630 million on Facebook stock since its debut.
Timeline
| Year | Month and date | Event type | Event |
| 2003 | October 28 | Prelude | Mark Zuckerberg releases Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook. It is described as a Harvard University version of Hot or Not. |
| 2004 | January | Creation | Mark Zuckerberg begins with his fellow co-founders writing Facebook. |
| 2004 | February 4 | Creation | Zuckerberg launches Facebook as a Harvard-only social network. |
| 2004 | April 13 | Financial/legal | Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin form Thefacebook.com LLC, a partnership. |
| 2004 | June | Funding | Facebook receives its first investment from Peter Thiel for US$500,000. |
| 2004 | July 29 | Financial/legal | Facebook incorporates into a new company, and Sean Parker becomes its president. |
| 2004 | August | Product | To compete with growing campus-only service i2hub, Zuckerberg launches Wirehog. It is a precursor to Facebook Platform applications. |
| 2004 | September | Financial/legal | ConnectU files a lawsuit against Zuckerberg and other Facebook founders. |
| 2004 | December 30 | Userbase | Facebook achieves its one millionth registered user. |
| 2005 | May 26 | Funding | Accel Partners invests $13 million into Facebook. |
| 2005 | July 19 | Acquisition talks | News Corp acquires MySpace, spurring rumors about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. |
| 2005 | August 23 | Product | Facebook acquires Facebook.com domain for $200,000. |
| 2005 | September | Product | Facebook launches a high school version of the website. |
| 2005 | October | Userbase | Facebook expands to UK universities. Cambridge, Oxford and the University of the West of England are the first three UK universities on the platform. |
| 2005 | October | Product | Facebook launches its photos feature with no restrictions on storage. |
| 2005 | December | Product | Facebook introduces the ability to tag friends in photos. |
| 2006 | March 28 | Acquisition talks | A potential acquisition of Facebook is reportedly under negotiations, for $750 million first, then later $2 billion. |
| 2006 | April | Userbase | Facebook expands its membership requirements to include corporate employees. |
| 2006 | August 22 | Product | Facebook launches a blogging feature known as "Facebook Notes". |
| 2006 | September 26 | Userbase | Membership is opened to anyone. |
| 2006 | September 6 | Product | Facebook launches News Feed. The original news feed is an algorithmically generated and constantly refreshing summary of updates about the activities of one's friends. The concept was relatively new at the time, with Twitter having launched only a few months in advance. |
| 2006 | September | Acquisition talks | Facebook discusses with Yahoo! about the latter possibly acquiring the former, for $1 billion. |
| 2007 | January 10 | Product | Facebook launches m.facebook.com and officially announces mobile support. |
| 2007 | May 24 | Product | Facebook announces Facebook Platform for developers to build applications on top of Facebook's social graph. |
| 2007 | October 24 | Funding | Microsoft announces that it will purchase a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion. However, Microsoft also gained ad exclusivity in this deal, so the $15 billion valuation figure is disputed. |
| 2007 | November 6 | Product | Facebook launches Facebook Beacon with 44 partner sites at the time of launch. Beacon is part of Facebook's advertisement system that sends data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. Certain activities on partner sites are published to a user's News Feed. On the same day, Facebook launched Facebook Pages. |
| 2007 | November 19 | Product | Facebook removes "is" from status updates, allowing users to adopt a more free-form version of status updates. |
| 2008 | May | Team | Adam D'Angelo, an early employee and chief technology officer, leaves Facebook. |
| 2008 | June | Financial/legal | 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. |
| 2008 | July 21 | Product | Facebook launches a complete site redesign with options for tabbed redesign, and allows users to opt into it. By September 2008, it forces all users to opt-in. |
| 2008 | August | Financial/legal | Employees reportedly privately sell their shares to venture capital firms, at a company valuation of between $3.75 billion to $5 billion. |
| 2008 | October | Physical location | Facebook sets up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. |
| 2008 | November | Product | Facebook launches Facebook Credits in order to help users purchase Facebook gifts. |
| 2009 | February 9 | Product | Facebook activates the Facebook like button. |
| 2009 | August | Acquisition | Facebook acquires FriendFeed. |
| 2009 | September | Financial/legal | Facebook claims that it has turned cash flow positive for the first time. |
| 2009 | September 10 | Product | Facebook announces a feature whereby people can @-tag friends in their status updates and comments. |
| 2009 | September | Product | Facebook shuts down Beacon. |
| 2010 | February | Acquisition | Facebook acquires Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions. |
| 2010 | April 2 | Acquisition | Facebook announces the acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvy-shot for an undisclosed amount. |
| 2010 | April 19 | Product | Facebook introduces Community Pages, which are Pages that are populated with articles from Wikipedia. |
| 2010 | June | Financial/legal | Facebook employees sell shares of the company on SecondMarket at a company valuation of $11.5 billion. |
| 2010 | June | Product | Facebook introduces the option to Like individual comments. |
| 2010 | October 1 | Popular culture | The Social Network, a film about the beginnings of Facebook directed by David Fincher & stars Jesse Eisenberg as Mark 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. |
| 2010 | December | Product | Facebook launches a redesign that emphasizes the most important parts of someone's life, including one's biographic information, photos, education, work experience, and important relationships. It replaces the tabs at the top of each profile page with links on the left side of the page. |
| 2011 | January | Funding | $500 million is invested into Facebook for 1% of the company, placing its worth at $50 billion. |
| 2011 | February | Product | Facebook application and content aggregator Pixable estimates that Facebook will host 100 billion photos by summer 2011. |
| 2011 | June 28 | Competition | Google launches Google+, widely perceived as a competitor to Facebook. Commentators believe that Facebook's subsequent rapid release of new features and improvements may have in part been hastened due to competition from Google+. |
| 2011 | July 6 | Product | Facebook partners with Skype to add video chat and updates its website interface. |
| 2011 | August 9, then October 19 | Product | Facebook Messenger is launched for Android and IOS. October 19, 2011 update makes the app available to Blackberry os. |
| 2011 | September, then November 30 | Product | Facebook increases the character limit for status update posts from 500 to 5,000 in September and to 63,206 on November 30. |
| 2011 | September 14 | Product | Facebook allows people to subscribe to non-friends and to set the extent to which they receive updates from their existing friends and people they are subscribing to. |
| 2011 | September 15 | Product | Facebook partners with Heroku for Facebook application development using the Facebook Platform. |
| 2011 | September 22 | Product | Facebook launches new UI Timeline in F8 Convention. |
| 2011 | October 6 | Accessibility | Facebook for SIM, a client/server SIM application developed by international digital security company Gemalto that enables people to access Facebook using the SMS protocol on their mobile phones, without needing a data plan, is released in partnership with select carriers. |
| 2011 | October 10 | Accessibility | Facebook launches iPad app. |
| 2011 | December 21 | Product | Facebook login page changes due to Facebook Timeline addition. |
| 2012 | January 10 | Product | Facebook starts showing advertisements in the news feed. The advertisements are generally for pages that one's Facebook friends have engaged with. |
| 2012 | April | Acquisition | Facebook acquires Instagram for $1 billion. |
| 2012 | May 12 | Financial/legal | Facebook IPO: Facebook goes public, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company. |
| 2012 | June 13 | Product | Facebook launches Facebook Exchange, a real-time bidding ad system where advertisers can bid on users based on third-party websites visited by the users. |
| 2012 | October | Userbase | Facebook reaches 1 billion active users. |
| 2013 | January 15 | Product | Facebook announces and begins rolling out Facebook Graph Search. |
| 2013 | January 30, then April 9 | Product | Facebook rolls out detailed and fine-grained emoticons to express different actions and emotional states in one's status updates. |
| 2013 | March 7 | Product | Facebook announces major planned changes to the News Feed. However, it is later revealed that Facebook abandoned these changes after getting negative feedback from users. |
| 2013 | March 8 | Acquisition | Facebook announces that they acquired the team from Storylane, but not the product itself. |
| 2013 | April 4, then April 12 | Product | 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. |
| 2013 | April 15 | Product | Facebook launches a new timeline with Video Autoplay. |
| 2013 | April–July | Product | Facebook launches Stickers, initially only for its iOS apps in April, but later expanding to its web version in July. |
| 2013 | June 12, then June 27 | Product | Facebook announces support for hashtags, initially only for the web. Later, more functionality is added and hashtags are extended to the mobile site and apps. |
| 2013 | 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 unconstitutional. |
| 2013 | August 20 | Userbase/accessibility | Facebook launches Internet.org in collaboration with six cellphone companies. Internet.org aims to bring affordable Internet access to everybody by increasing affordability, increasing efficiency, and facilitating the development of new business models around the provision of Internet access. |
| 2013 | September 26 | Product | Facebook begins letting people edit their posts and comments after publishing. |
| 2013 | September 29 | Product | Facebook announces that it will begin rolling out Graph Search for posts and comments. |
| 2013 | October 13 | Acquisition | Facebook acquires Onavo, an Israeli analytics company, for approximately $120 million. |
| 2013 | November 13 | Acquisition talks | A number of news outlets reports that Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion USD but was spurned. |
| 2013 | December 18 | Financial/legal | Facebook, Zuckerberg, & banks face IPO lawsuit. |
| 2014 | January 13 | Acquisition | Facebook acquires Branch Media, and it is announced that the team working on the startup will join Facebook to work on conversations products for Facebook that builds on similar ideas as Branch Media's products, while Branch Media's existing products will continue to operate separately. Facebook confirms that the acquisition is a talent acquisition. |
| 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. |
| 2014 | January 30, then February 3 | Product | On January 30, 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. |
| 2014 | February 4 | Milestone | Facebook marks the ten-year anniversary of its launch, and Mark Zuckerberg writes a public post about why he is proud of Facebook so far. The Pew Research Center releases a report about increasing Facebook usage by adults to mark the occasion. Many other commentators write articles about Facebook to honor the occasion. |
| 2014 | February 4–7 | Product | On February 4, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Facebook introduces its Look Back feature that creates an automated video for each person looking back on the person's life as recorded on Facebook. On February 7, Facebook adds the ability to edit the Look Back videos. |
| 2014 | February 13 | Political activism | Facebook opens up many new LGBTQ-friendly gender identity and pronoun options. |
| 2014 | February 19 | Acquisition | Facebook announces that it is acquiring the Sequoia Capital-backed multi-platform mobile messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion USD plus an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing. According to the announcement, WhatsApp will continue to operate independently, Facebook will continue developing Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum will join the Facebook Board of Directors. On February 24, in a keynote address to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Zuckerberg says that the WhatsApp acquisition is part of the Internet.org vision. |
| 2014 | March 3 | Acquisition | 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. |
| 2014 | 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, but are more minor and focused. |
| 2014 | March 17 | Product | Facebook's face recognition algorithm reaches near-human accuracy in identifying faces. |
| 2014 | March 25 | Acquisition | 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. |
| 2014 | March 27 | Accessibility | 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. |
| 2014 | April 24 | Product | Facebook announces FB Newswire to help journalists find news on its website. |
| 2014 | April 30 | Product, accessibility | Facebook launches anonymous login so that people can use apps without giving them their data. |
| 2014 | June 18 | Product | Facebook releases Facebook Slingshot, an instant messaging software application for sharing photos and videos with friends, for Android and iOS devices. |
| 2014 | July 21 | Product | Facebook launches Save, a read-it-later feature that allows users to save links, places, and media pages for later perusal. |
| 2014 | September 15 onward | 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. 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. |
| 2014 | October 6 | Acquisition | Facebook officially completes the acquisition of WhatsApp, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum agrees to match Mark Zuckerberg's $1 salary. |
| 2014 | 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 app had been reported on October 7. |
| 2014 | October 31 | Accessibility | Facebook creates a custom Tor link, making it easier for people to access Facebook anonymously in locations where it is censored. |
| 2014 | 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. |
| 2014 | 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. |
| 2014 | December 11 | Outreach | 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 | Acquisition | Facebook acquires Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. |
| 2015 | January 8 | Acquisition | 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | March 25 | Product | At the first day of the 2015 F8 conference, 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | 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 and to TrueCaller, an app with crowdsourced data. |
| 2015 | April 28, April 30 | 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. |
| 2015 | May 12 | Product | Facebook launches "Instant Articles" for Publishers. 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. |
| 2015 | 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 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | 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. |
| 2015 | August | Product | On August 5, 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. |
| 2015 | August 26 | Product | Facebook begins rolling out a human- and AI-powered virtual assistant called "M". M is available through Facebook's Messenger app, and is capable of performing tasks on behalf of users, including placing restaurant reservations and booking travel. At launch, M is only available to a small group of testers, and in April 2016 Facebook would confirm that it could be years before M is broadly available. |
| 2015 | August 27 | Userbase | Facebook announces that it has hit the milestone of 1 billion users accessing it on a single day. |
| 2015 | October 27 | Accessibility | Facebook announces an initiative called 2G Tuesdays. With this initiative, Facebook engineers can opt in to access Facebook at 2G speeds for an hour every Tuesday. The goal is to make Facebook engineers better understand the challenges of using Facebook with poor Internet speeds, and in turn help improve the Facebook experience for these users. |
| 2015 | 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 | JanuaryMarch | Product | Facebook Live that was originally launched in August 2015 and limited to celebrities, becomes available to all U.S. iPhone users on January 28. On February 18, the global rollout begins. It becomes available to U.S. Android users in the week following February 26. Starting March 1, Facebook starts pushing live content more compared to older content. Commentators describe Facebook Live as marking Facebook's entry into the live-streaming space, competing with Twitter-owned Periscope. |
| 2016 | February 24 | Product | Facebook releases Facebook Reactions to the general public. The feature allows people to use five additional reactions beyond just the "like" action to convey their reaction to a post. The new reactions are "Love", "Haha", "Wow", "Sad", and "Angry". Although the names differ across languages, the emoticons used are the same across languages. Each user can add at most one reaction to a post. An early version of Reactions was released in October 2015 in Ireland and Spain. |
| 2016 | March 18 | Product | Facebook provide "Basketball Game" function in Messenger. |
| 2016 | April 12 and 13 | Product | Facebook F8 for 2016 includes a number of announcements about the product roadmap. Key highlights include: Messenger chatbots and a new bot engine, open source virtual reality camera, more tools for Facebook apps and Facebook Live, allowing businesses to send sponsored messages to people who have messaged them in the past, more changes around improving rights management for videos, and increased support for React Native from Microsoft and Samsung. |
| 2016 | April 21 | Product | Facebook announces that it is updating its news feed algorithm to take into account the time that a person spends reading the article, off Facebook. In the previous set of updates rolled out in June and July 2015, Facebook had started taking into account the time people spend viewing the item in their news feed, but the new change takes into account the user's activity outside Facebook. The change is part of Facebook's Feed Quality Program, and is a result of research showing that people's activity on Facebook failed to fully capture the extent to which they were interested in particular items. Commentators believe that this is likely to lead to a significant reduction in the circulation of misleading clickbait on the social network. |
| 2016 | April 27 and 28 | Financial/legal, userbase | Facebook releases its 2016 Q1 earnings report, showing an increase in earnings to 77 cents per share up from 42 cents per share a year ago. The earnings beat analyst expectations, and cause Facebook share prices to soar, leading its market cap to exceed that of Johnson & Johnson. Facebook also reports an increase of 57% in advertising revenue to $5.2 billion, with mobile advertising now accounting for 82% of advertising revenue. It also reports a year-over-year increase in daily active users by 16% to 1.09 billion and in monthly active users by 15% to 1.65 billion. Facebook also announces a proposal to create a new class of nonvoting stock. |
| 2016 | May | Product, controversy | Gizmodo publishes a series of articles about alleged problems with Facebook's Trending Topics section, including lack of integration of the Trending Topics team with Facebook's overall culture and workforce, discretion vested in that team to make decisions, and potential for bias in the way the discretion is exercised, with a particular focus on bias against conservatism. The controversy is picked up by other news media, the United States Senate Committee, and many conservative outlets. Facebook defends itself against the allegations, but also invites leading conservatives, including United States Republican presidential primary frontrunner Donald Trump, libertarian-leaning conservative commentator Glenn Beck, and CNN commentator S. E. Cupp, for a meeting to discuss and address concerns. On May 23, Facebook announces changes to its Trending Topics section, and releases a 28-page document on the subject. |
| 2016 | May 25 | Product | Facebook announces that it is shutting down Facebook Exchange, its desktop ad exchange. The reasons cited include that FBX makes a very small share of Facebook's ad revenue, and that it is of limited utility because is purely desktop-based, and any successful ad campaign must include mobile, that people are increasingly using. |
| 2016 | June 15 | Product | Facebook introduces the secret Messenger soccer game, similar to the basketball game. |
| 2016 | June 29 | Product | Facebook publishes its list of "News Feed Values" that will guide its decisions and algorithms for the news feed. A core value listed is that friends and family come first, and Facebook announces that it is increasing the circulation of content about friends and family relative to publisher content. |
| 2016 | August 4 | Product | Facebook announces algorithm changes that penalize "clickbait" titles, based on a score assigned by a machine-learned model. The model is trained based on cases where users like a link, click it, and then immediately bounce and unlike pages. The algorithm is applied both at the web domain level and at the Facebook page level. |
| 2016 | August 11 | Product | Facebook and AdBlock Plus enter into an escalating war. AdBlock Plus tries to block advertisements and sponsored content on Facebook's site, but Facebook releases a workaround, to which AdBlock Plus releases its own workaround. Facebook's argument is that ad blockers are a crude solution, and Facebook's approach of giving users more fine-grained control over the content they see in the feed is superior. AdBlock Plus disagrees with the assessment and says ad blockers should not be blamed for users' desire to have an ad-free experience. The ad blocking war continues into September and discussion continues into November, with Facebook reportedly having boosted its ad revenue owing to its blocking of ad blockers. |
| 2016 | October 3 | Product | In the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, Facebook launches Marketplace, a way to buy and sell items through Facebook. Marketplace appears as a tab in the mobile app. The feature has been compared to Craigslist. |
| 2016 | November 30 | Product | Facebook launches in select countries Instant Games on Messenger and Facebook News Feed, which allows users to play games without installing new apps. The games are provided via HTML5. At launch, Instant Games does not allow game developers to place ads or in-game payments in games, but Facebook commits to allowing eventual monetization. The platform initially has 17 games. |
| 2016 | December 15 | Product | Facebook announces a set of news feed updates to combat the problem of fake news and hoaxes. These include more streamlining for users reporting fake news, a partnership with signatory organizations to Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles to examine items reported as fake, learning from lower share rates for people who view the article that the item might be fake, and warnings to users when they share news that is disputed or possibly fake. |
| 2017 | January 11 | Outreach | Facebook introduces the Facebook Journalism Project, an effort to bolster its relationship with media and news organizations and journalists. |
| 2017 | end of January | Product | Facebook begins integrating the Messenger interface into the messages inbox, replacing the old inbox interface. This change makes the Facebook messages inbox interface similar to that seen on messenger.com. |
| 2017 | February 15 | Product | In the United States and Canada, Facebook launches a feature to search for jobs. The feature allows businesses to post job openings through the status update composer, and allows users to apply to those job postings. |
| 2017 | February 16 | Mark Zuckerberg pens a long note on his personal Facebook titled "Building Global Community" that talks about supportive, safe, informed, civically-engaged, and inclusive community. The note receives widespread discussion, including comparisons with a political manifesto. | |
| 2017 | March 23 | Product | Facebook adds reactions and mentions inside Messenger. |
| 2017 | April 27 | Accessibility | Facebook launches Messenger Lite in over 100 additional countries. |
| 2017 | May 3 | Product | Facebook adds reactions to comments. Reactions were previously available on messages and Facebook posts but not in comments. |
| 2017 | May 21 | Controversy | publishes The Facebook Files, leaked Facebook documents detailing Facebook's moderation policies for graphic depictions of sex and violence as well as racist, sexist, and hate speech. The revelations lead to public discussion of the specifics of Facebook's policies, as well as calls on Facebook to be more transparent. |
| 2017 | March 30, May 24 | Product | Facebook Fundraising is launched. On March 30, the fundraising tools are introduced in beta. On May 24, the product exits beta and is available in the United States for all users over 18 years of age. |
| 2017 | June 27 | Userbase | Facebook reaches 2 billion monthly active users. |
| 2017 | Product | Facebook Messenger rolls out rich text formatting, with support for bold, italics, inline code, and strike-through. In addition, math expressions are implemented through. | |
| 2017 | Userbase/controversy | Facebook blocks 470 fake accounts after claiming them to be linked to ’s, which is suspect to have bought thousands of ads during the United States presidential campaign. The company claims having discovered a Russian-funded campaign to promote divisive social and political messages on its network. | |
| 2017 | Controversy | United States president declares on that was always "anti-Trump". However, the claim wouldn't have sequel in the stock market, with Facebook’s share price on the rise. | |
| 2017 | Outage | Facebook and experience widespread outage impacting a large number of users' ability to access the services across the world, with the areas experiencing the most problems appearing to be the West and East Coasts of North America, and various parts of Europe, with parts of South America and Southeast Asia getting errors as well. | |
| 2017 | Staff | Under intensifying pressure from legislators and consumers to clean up its site, Facebook pledges to double its 10,000-person safety and security staff by end of 2018. | |
| 2017 | Program launch | In an effort to combat, Facebook encourages users in to submit their nude photos to a pilot project designed to prevent intimate images from being shared without consent. Adults who have shared nude or sexually explicit photos with someone online, and who are worried about unauthorised distribution, under the program can securely send the photos to themselves via Messenger, a process that allows Facebook to "hash" them, creating an identifier which would block any further distribution on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger as a pre-emptive strike against revenge porn, a common method of abuse and exploitation online. | |
| 2017 | Product | In an effort to combat fake news and promote authentic, fact-based journalism, Facebook launches Trust Indicators, a tool to help users determine how each particular publication works. The measure is also taken by and. | |
| 2017 | Product | After live videos having skyrocketed on Facebook in the last months, the social network launches Facebook Creator, an app for mobile video posts offering influencers Live Creative Kit for adding intros and outros to broadcasts, a unified inbox of Facebook and comments plus chats, cross-posting to and expansive analytics. | |
| 2017 | Staff | Facebook opens new office in, expecting to hire 800 new staff. Interiorly designed by, the office would be Facebook's biggest engineering hub outside the United States. | |
| 2017 | Product | Facebook launches Messenger Kids, a version of Messenger for children from ages six to 12. The app does not require a Facebook account. Rather, parents are able to manage a child’s Messenger Kids app from their Facebook account, controlling which friends and family members the child is able to contact. | |
| 2017 | Product | In an effort to prevent people from impersonating others, Facebook expands its use of facial recognition technology by introducing new tool that would alert people that a friend, or a friend of a friend, uploaded a photo of them, even if they haven’t been tagged in the picture. | |
| 2018 | Acquisition | Facebook acquires personalized image search engine Dreambit. | |
| 2018 | Acquisition | Facebook acquires -based biometric ID verification startup Confirm.io, which offers a system for verifying the authenticity of ID cards, biometrics and facial recognition. | |
| 2018 | Controversy | Facebook admits to the that its software, in some cases, recommended content produced by Russian propaganda operatives around the time of the 2016 presidential election; stating however that it has found insignificant overlap between Russian-produced content and pages created by the Trump's election campaign. | |
| 2018 | Policy | In an intentionally broad policy aimed at stopping scammers, Facebook bans all ads promoting cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and initial coin offerings. | |
| 2018 | Userbase | Facebook reports losing daily users for the first time ever in the and. However, globally, the number of people using Facebook daily rose 14% compared to the previous year, but falling by 700,000 people in the US and Canada for the first time. | |
| 2018 | March 17–26 | Controversy | A reveals that British political consulting firm harvested 50 million Facebook profiles and used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual voters in the United States, in order to target them with personalized political advertisements. On March 26, the United States Federal Trade Commission announces it is investigating Facebook's privacy practices following the revelations. The scandal would affect deeply the image of Facebook, with a loss of nearly US$50 billion in since the data scandal. |
| 2018 | April 10–11 | Legal | attends his first congressional hearings at, testifying about controversies over Facebook data privacy, and being questioned for almost 10 hours in two days by senators and representatives over the company's privacy policies. On the first day, Zuckerberg repeatedly apologizes and promises privacy reforms on Facebook, but also pointedly defends his company against the threat of new legislation. Facing tougher questions on the second day regarding Facebook policies about,, political bias and the social network's, Zuckerberg would reject suggestions from Congress members that Facebook users did not have enough control over their data. However, he would explain plans to tighten data policies, protect users from further leaks and become more transparent about who's advertising on his site. |
| 2018 | April 26 | Legal | Facebook CTO is grilled for five hours by the UK Parliament; he is a stand-in for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Among other things, in the testimony he gives estimates of Facebook's numbers of "dark ads" on Facebook, in connection with consumer advocate Martin Lewis whose name was used by malicious advertisers on advertisements for spam and misleading products. |