(Editor's note: In the upcoming year, The Chronicle will occasionally link to stories from other college publications that we believe our readers might find especially interesting.)
Six and a half years later, seemingly every kid on campus has one. But back in 2004, future billionaire and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was happy to have a few hundred people register on his website.
The Harvard Crimson's first story about Facebook is currently the publication's most popular story online. The headline reads "Hundreds Register for New Facebook Webstite." At the time—February 9, 2004—the company's URL was www.thefacebook.com. (And, apparently for purists, the www.thefacebook.com still directs you to the site.)
Zuckerberg said he didn't want to wait for Harvard to make its own version of Facebook and thought that he could make a better version in just about a week. It turns out he was right—the site recently reached 500 million users.
But back in 2004, the scale of Facebook was modest:
As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.“I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” he said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.”
Facebook has received significant attention this summer both for debate over its privacy policy and the upcoming film "The Social Network." Check out the preview below.
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