Facebook is the most popular social network in the world. It is an online community where users can create profiles to share information, interests, thoughts, photos, and videos with their friends and acquaintances. Facebook was designed at Harvard in 2004, by student, Mark Zuckerberg. It would go on to profoundly change interaction and socialization amongst individuals. Facebook is available in more than 70 languages, has more than one billion users, and is the first social network with as many active users. In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg, then a 20-year-old Harvard student, invented an online game, called Facemash, which allowed people to vote on their preference of two randomly chosen photographs from the University’s yearbooks.
The project was so successful that it persuaded Zuckerberg to create a web community that would soon extend to other American colleges. It was called “thefacebook”, which then became simply, Facebook. Harvard students Divya Narendra and, twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss accused Zuckerberg of having plagiarized their ideas. Meanwhile, the site won more users and received its first funding in 2004 of $500,000 from entrepenuer, Peter Thiel then in 2005, $12.7 million from venture company, Accel Partners. The company would go on to receive hundreds of millions of dollars for years to come. The value of Facebook grew hand in hand with its users, until the 2012 IPO, or initial public offering, which valued company's share at 15 billion dollars.
The company’s headquarters are currently located in Menlo Park, California. Since May 2012, Facebook has been listed on the Nasdaq list. In 2013, the company had a turnover of 2.59 billion dollars and a net profit of 523 million dollars. The dispute between Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins ended in 2008 with a legal agreement that gave the twins 1.2 million shares of Facebook, which was worth 300 million dollars at the time of the IPO. The 2010 film, The Social Network retold the events of this lawsuit.