Facebook will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Tuesday after a roller coaster first decade that has seen it impact the tech, business and cultural landscape in numerous ways.
The site now boasts more than a billion monthly active users, but continues to grapple with legal issues across the world, as it poses questions around privacy and the use of user data for advertising purposes.
Initially launching as a site just for US college students on 4 February 2004, Thefacebook.com, as it was first called, quickly grew to be a go-to destination for non-students as it opened its doors to the general public in 2006.
The site's chief executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg said last week during the company's earnings conference call: "We're looking forward to our next decade and to helping connect the rest of the world."
The anniversary comes amid a period of huge success for the firm after it announced profits of $1.5bn for 2013 with more than half of its advertising revenue coming from users on mobile devices. Revenue generated from mobile advertising had previously been a stumbling block for the firm, with investors worrying it was not properly monetising its widely used mobile apps.
In its 10 years, Facebook has broken new legal ground, with many of its money-making schemes and their associated user data policies angering privacy watchdogs, national governments and the EU.
Facebook has also attempted to fend off multiple lawsuits from disgruntled users who were unhappy about the ways in which their data has been used. In a particularly costly case last year, Facebook paid $20m in a class action lawsuit relating to users' images being used in advertising content.
The firm has already revealed how it intends to connect the developing world to the internet and – indirectly – to Facebook. Its Internet.org campaign looks to connect users in poorer countries in partnership with firms such as Samsung, Nokia and Qualcomm.
Facebook also recently announced plans for a new standalone Paper mobile, which is dedicated to news consumption, as it looks to rival Twitter in terms of content discovery.
The story of Facebook has even been given the Hollywood treatment, with the movie The Social Network hitting the screens in 2010.
source: v3.co.uk
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