On this day, February 4th, 2004 a tiny site by the name of thefacebook.com was launched by a young Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Initially started as an online directory of students at Harvard University, it quickly spread to other colleges and eventually to the general population in 2006. In the beginning, you had to be a college student to sign up for Facebook or at least have a college email address associated to one of the allowed universities. This was a great way of meeting your fellow peers that you probably otherwise would not have interacted with at school.
For the rest of us who weren’t in school anymore, we had the likes of Friendster and later Myspace and while both sites were quite popular in their time, they were soon overtaken by Facebook once it was released to the general public. Now known as just Facebook, it is pretty much “THE” social network in 2019 with roughly 2.32 billion monthly active users worldwide.
I’m one of those users. I started a Facebook account somewhere around June 2008. I did it mainly to keep in touch with old high school friends I hadn’t seen in years and Myspace was getting a bit long in the tooth. I had noticed that less and less of my friends were on it, hence the switch to Facebook where there seemed to be a lot less clutter and more of my friends actually interacting. About 11 years later, I’m still on Facebook and the only people I follow are actual friends, family, and close colleagues. Privacy issues with Facebook don’t bother me because I don’t have my page open to the public and I don’t “like” a ton of business pages. I just use it to keep in contact with people. Whether it’s on my laptop or on my smartphone, there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t check my FB several times an hour. Facebook is a very big part of my daily routine now.
With that said, I want to know from our readers here how many of you are on Facebook and when did you first set up your account? How has it changed your life? Are you still an active user? Has the recent bad press with Facebook and its questionable privacy issues led you to delete your account?
Leave your comments down below. We’d love to hear from you.
