Facebook Turns 5: Happy Birthday Facebook
Published by Rodney Rumford February 3rd, 2009 in Facebook, Facebook News.Ahhh. Facebook is such a baby; it is just 5 years old and continues on it’s path for world domination. It is hard to believe that the site is only 5 years old tomorrow. In internet years that make it in its mid 20’s. The evolution of facebook and the rate of innovation and velocity at which they implement changes has been quite mind numbing. From the launch of the facebook F8 application platform which was just under 2 years ago; to the growth of over 220 million members worldwide which has been unprecedented from any other membership website online.
So I say to all the naysayers “220 Million People Can’t Be Wrong”. I remember when people said (some still say) Facebook was fad.
A few crowning statistics to put onto the Facebook Birthday Cake:
• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 3.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
• More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month
Here is a bit of a trip down memory lane of what facebook used to look like to what it has evolved into today. Here is the evolution of the facebook profile page
Here is a comparison of the facebook homepage circa 2005 vs. 2009
According to facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn’t consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.” You can read Mark’s full blog post here. Facebook will also have a free gift tomorrow to share the birthday love http://www.facebook.com/giftshop.php?
Happy Birthday Facebook! Cheers!
4 Responses to “Facebook Turns 5: Happy Birthday Facebook”
- 1 Pingback on Feb 16th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
what about Friendster?
Thanks, Rodney, for taking the time to visit my class this week! It was very helpful and interesting.
I am a 52 year old mother of two who has enjoyed connecting with friends on facebook. I had some beautiful pictures, comments, groups, memories, etc. on my facebook page, and had spent a year accumulating 104 of my (real) friends, not just hundreds of casual acquaintances like many others…
Today I learned my account was disabled but I cannot imagine why and no explanation was given. I never post swear words or anything remotely offensive. This makes me terribly sad, and also angry that something I created was taken away from me with no explanation.
This makes me very tentative about this whole facebook thing though I had encouraged many of my friends to join.