Facebook is Five Years Old

Facebook is the biggest growing social networking site to date. Mark Zuckerberg founded the hugely popular social networking site while he was a university student. Over the past five years Facebook has received many investments, the first being five hundred thousand dollars from the PayPal co founder Peter Thiel. A year later Facebook got a further 12.7 million dollars in venture capital from Accel Partners as well as plenty more big investments.

Over the years all the major online companies such as Yahoo and Google have approached Facebook for a buy out. Mark Zuckerberg has always remained adamant that he did not want to sell. But on October 24, 2007 Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for 240 million dollars, which ultimately meant the company was valued at around fifteen billion dollars.

But times move on and Facebook is the largest social networking site of its kind and it is now 5 years old. Facebook will be throwing huge celebrations and is going to be giving 150 million lucky users a mystery virtual gift. Facebook is now well ahead of its competition MySpace, as they have more than 20 million more active users.

Not so long ago people used to be terrified to post pictures of themselves online, I believe that is why Facebook has risen to fame in such a short space of time, simply because they have gave people a safe way to connect with family, friends and colleagues. A vast majority of people now upload images of every part of there lives including holidays, weddings, birthdays and regular days out.

Besides from the safe aspect of Facebook, another great function they have allowed is the creation of applications. We all know MySpace suffered because of the spam and people trying to promote themselves, well Facebook gives a genuine platform that webmasters can explore. You can create some create applications using the Facebook API which have the potential to go viral and brand your business.

You can just see how fast Facebook have grown, more than fifteen million users update their Facebook status bars everyday and millions upload new pictures or leave comments. On their friends profiles.

Well I applaud Facebook for being around for so long and I hope the next five years goes just as good, although it will be a lot harder as technologies develop themselves and more competitors hit the social networking bandwagon.