Do you celebrate your birthday on day your parents got nasty? Or do you celebrate it on the day you were born? Mashable, CNN Money/Fortune Magazine and others are reporting this morning that today is Facebook’s birthday — as listed on their own Facebook fan page.
That seemed a little early to me so did a little digging through the Internet Archive. While Feburary 4, 2004 may have been Facebook’s incorporation date — the date it was officially conceived — it didn’t go live until sometime between April 8, 2005 and August 6, 2005 — so sayeth the most excellent Internet Archive Wayback Machine. So have a very happy unbirthday, Facebook! (Today’s my unbirthday too!) Up until then the Facebook domain name was registered to something called AboutFace.
Way back in the summer of 2005 Facebook was called, “The Facebook” and was listed as “A Mark Zuckerberg production.” It, as many of you remember, was limited to only a limited group of colleges and universities. Now Facebook has exploded to 350 million registered users, 175 of which aren’t just active monthly — but every single day. That’s about the same number of people in the countries of Great Britain, France and Italy combined.
Check out the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine — it’s pretty fun.
Hm, this is interesting although I don’t believe the information on the “Wayback Machine” is actually correct. I graduated college in May 2005 and Facebook, or “The Facebook” at the time, was already big with college students all over the US. The site was only available to certain schools at first, one of which was U of I and I remember my friends couldn’t wait for Northern to get it so that they could ask me to be friends. Northern finally joined the Facebook club second semester my Senior year in college which would have been early 2005. So, their birthday might actually be early 2004, not late summer 2005 like the Wayback Machine suggests.