An amazing success story called Facebook

From a Harvard dorm room to becoming one of the world's biggest internet success stories, it has been an incredible journey for Facebook.

What started off a college boy's passion is valued at more than $100 billion today.

....

With a big ticket IPO in the offing, the company has caught the world's attention.

Founded in 2004 by four enthusiastic youngsters - Mark Zuckerburg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, Facebook has grown to over 2,000 employees and 845 million users.

...

Zuckerberg loved computers and programming since his school days. He began writing software while in middle school.

After his father taught him Atari BASIC programming in the 1990s, a software developer David Newman taught him. Newman called him a "prodigy," adding that it was "tough to stay ahead of him."

He enjoyed developing communication tools and games.

....

He even built a software program he called 'ZuckNet', which allowed all the computers in the house and his father's dental office to communicate by pinging each other.  

It is considered a 'primitive' version of AOL's Instant Messenger, which came out the following year.

....

During Zuckerberg's high school years, he built a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits. 

At Harvard, he began a program he called CourseMatch, which allowed users to make class selection decisions based on the choices of other students and also to help them form study groups.

....

Later, he created a different program he initially called Facemash that let students select the best looking person from a collection of photos.

The site went up over a weekend, but by Monday morning the college shut it down because its popularity had crashed the Harvard's server and prevented students from accessing the Internet.

....

However, many students complained that their photos were being used without permission.

Zuckerberg apologised, but went ahead with many more big plans. Zuckerberg realised that there was a huge potential in social networking.

After the Facemash issue, students wanted an internal website that would publish photos and contact details.

....

Mark decided to take this up if the university did not start such a site. Zuckerberg began writing code for a new web site in January 2004.

On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched 'Thefacebook', originally located at facebook.com.

....

The membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate students at Harvard registered for this service.

It became serious business and needed more focus and strategy to develop the site.

....

Eduardo Saverin took care of the business aspects, Dustin Moskovitz was the programmer and Andrew McCollum, the graphic artist.

Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the Web site.

Together they made a cracking team.

....

In March 2004, Facebook expanded its reach to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.

....

Facebook was incorporated in mid-2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.

In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. The first investment came from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

The company dropped 'The' from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

...

By 2005, the company was valuated at $100 million for an additional funding of $12.7 million by 3 more investors.

The turning point came with software biggies like Microsoft and Goldman Sachs investing the company. By 2011, Facebook has aggregated a total of $2.36 billion in funding.

....

Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising. Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and therefore Facebook serves only advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory.

Facebook is rapidly increasing user base and revenues.

....

The company had revenues to the tune of $3.7 billion in 2011, and $1 billion as net profit.

The profit grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010.

And in a historic move for the company, it has filed for a $5 billion initial public offering (IPO), making it one of the biggest in tech history and the biggest in internet history. Facebook has indeed conquered the world.

The IPO will value Facebook between $75 and $100 billion.