Early Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from a Harvard dorm in 2004, and it spread to college campuses like a virus — exclusive, intimate, and gated behind a .edu email address. By 2006, when it opened to anyone with an email address, the velvet rope had fallen and the era was over.
Mark Zuckerberg launched "TheFacebook" at thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm on February 4, 2004, alongside co-founders Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. More than half of Harvard's undergraduates registered within the first month. By March 2004, the network expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale, then rolled out to the other Ivy League schools and most US and Canadian universities.
The .edu email address became a status symbol — a marker that you belonged to the college world, that you were in. The ritual of the platform was intimate: writing on friends' walls, sending pokes that could mean anything or nothing, curating your profile's favorite movies and music as if assembling your identity. Getting "Facebook official" with a relationship felt like a rite of passage. In 2005, the company purchased the facebook.com domain from AboutFace Corporation for $200,000 and dropped the "The."
A high-school version launched in September 2005, beginning to crack the college-only world. Then on September 26, 2006, Facebook opened to anyone age 13 or older with an email address — no .edu required. The velvet rope came down, and what had been an intimate college social network suddenly became everyone's. That moment marked the end of this specific era: the era when Facebook was ours alone.
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