Facebook Launches as TheFacebook.com

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FEBRUARY 4, 2004

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (Harvard University)
22 years ago

On February 4, 2004, a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com, originally a Harvard-only social networking site modeled after university “face books” (student directories).

What began as a way to connect classmates—profiles, photos, relationship status, who-knows-who—wasn’t pitched as a planet-sized invention. It looked small, even mundane. But it tapped into something powerful: people’s desire to map their social world in real time, and to broadcast identity with almost no friction.

Within a few years, it spread far beyond universities, and eventually became Facebook, the flagship platform of a network that, by user counts, has often been described as the world’s largest social network.

Facebook’s rise changed more than communication: it changed expectations. Suddenly, the default was that you could find people, organize events, build communities, and share updates instantly, at scale.

It also created new questions that society is still working through: how algorithms shape attention, how identity becomes performance, how misinformation spreads, and how privacy gets renegotiated in public. Few platforms have had such an outsized influence on how politics, culture, and relationships move in the modern world.

—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——

Facebook’s launch matters because it marks a turning point in how human networks became digital systems:

• Identity became searchable. Real names and profiles made the internet feel “local” and personal.

• Communities became portable. Groups and events made organizing easier than ever.

• Attention became a commodity. The social graph evolved into an engine for influence, marketing, and media distribution.

Whether you see that as connective, corrosive, or both, the February 2004 launch is a clear milestone in the architecture of modern life.

—— THE TAKEAWAY ——

TheFacebook.com started as a campus directory. It became a global mirror—showing us not only who we know, but how we behave when the whole world is watching.

It’s a reminder that the biggest revolutions don’t always arrive as inventions. Sometimes they arrive as habits.

At Masters of Trivia, with our MOT utility token, we turn turning points like this into daily interactive learning, so curiosity becomes a habit, and history becomes something you can use.

How much do you know about Facebook’s early Harvard origins, how it expanded, and how social networks reshaped media, politics, and everyday life?

Take today’s quiz and test your knowledge of the site that helped define the 21st century’s digital public square.