What the company or idea is
Facebook is an American social networking service founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and four Harvard roommates. It began as ‘Thefacebook’, restricted to Harvard students, then expanded to universities and, in 2006, to anyone aged 13+ globally (14+ in South Korea, Spain, Quebec).
How it actually makes money
Facebook does not make money from users. It sells attention—user time, behaviour, and connections—to advertisers.
What works
Its distribution model works: it reached 500 million users by 2010 and 3.07 billion monthly active users by December 2023. Its accessibility across PCs, tablets, and smartphones—and status as the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s—confirms its infrastructural reach.
What does not
It does not sustain meaningful privacy, interoperability, or user control. Its cross-platform integration (e.g., Instagram-Messenger chat) centralises data but does not enable true portability or opt-out.
What to take from it
Its growth was mechanical: code written in a dorm, scaled via university-by-university rollout, funded by strategic financial advice—not vision—and sustained by institutionalising hacker pragmatism over process.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you are studying how a service built on free user labour, zero marginal cost distribution, and algorithmic attention capture became the default infrastructure for online social interaction.
