More info
- Creator
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Released
- Owner
- Meta
- Type
- Social network
- Website
- facebook.com
- Wikipedia
- en.wikipedia.org
The world's largest social network — launched by Mark Zuckerberg from a Harvard dorm (February 2004), today ~3 billion monthly users under the parent company Meta.
Defined modern social media: real names, friendship as a reciprocal graph, the News Feed as algorithmic distribution (2006), the Like button (2009), the Graph API that opened the door to the Cambridge Analytica scandal (2018). Stack: PHP → HHVM/Hack, MySQL, Memcached, RocksDB, TAO graph store.
Pure Facebook usage has declined in the West — but the Meta umbrella (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads) still dominates social attention. Criticised for algorithmic harms, privacy, and political influence.