Everyone's favorite social media platform is one year older today.
On Thursday, Facebook celebrates its 12th anniversary, and we can't believe just how fast the time has gone. Facebook has seen quite a few changes since its humble beginnings, evolving from a site created just for college students to now being one of the most popular websites around the world.
Mark Zuckerberg first launched the site on Feb. 4, 2004 at Harvard University. Called "Thefacebook," it was described as an "online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges."
The idea was to allow users to search for and connect with other people who attend the same school, as well as expand their social circle to connect with friends of friends. Users could also "see a visualization of your social network," which was a feature that literally showed maps of friends and how they were connected.
After being limited to just Harvard students, Thefacebook then launched at 34 different colleges and universities, such as MIT, Boston University, CUNY Hunter and Columbia University, in the spring of 2004.
In order to sign up for an account, the user needed to use their college email address that ended in ".edu."
By the fall of 2004, "the Wall" was introduced, which was the early version of the Timeline as we know it. The Wall was the place where users could write their friend a message, and it could only be seen when clicking on that specific user's profile. To view a conversation, users would have to look "wall-to-wall," meaning they would have to click on the first person's profile to see what they wrote and then the others to see the response.
The group feature also existed back then and was very popular. However, users could only join groups that were within their college network.
Thefacebook continued to grow in popularity among the college crowd, reaching its one million registered users on Dec. 30, 2004.
It was then time for expansion. The site finally started accepting high school students in the fall of 2005, followed by employees at companies like Apple and Microsoft, and international universities to join.
It was around this same time that the site introduced a feature that would change it as users knew it: photos. Users would be able to share photos and "tag" their friends without needing permission from the friends featured in the photo. The only photos that existed up until this point were users' profile images.
This was the age when Facebook looked more like MySpace than any other time, where users could enter their personal information, like what they were looking for (friendship, dating), their politic views, and tastes and interests. In 2005, the social networking site finally dropped the "the" to be known simply as "Facebook."
Fast-forward 11 years later, and Facebook continues to change and add new features.
Reflecting on how important it is to connect, Facebook released new statistics that give users a glimpse at just how much the site has grown.
"Over the past five years, the global Facebook community has more than doubled in size. Today we're announcing that during that same time period, the degrees of separation between a typical pair of Facebook users has continued to decrease to 3.57 degrees, down from 3.74 degrees in 2011. This is a significant reflection of how closely connected the world has become," Facebook writes.
Facebook is inviting its users to join in on the party by recognizing it as Friends Day, allowing them to view personalized videos that include special moments with the user's friends in a clip that can be shared, as well as new stickers for Messenger.
