Five Facebook facts for its 5th birthday

Many happy returns

4 February 2009 0:41 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Happy birthday to Facebook. 5 years ago today, the social networking site was launched by Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin. To celebrate its 5-year anniversary, here are five Facebook facts:

What's in a name?
Turns out Facebook wasn't always called Facebook. It originally launched as TheFacebook on thefacebook.com with Zuckerberg claiming he was "Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State". It didn't become Facebook.com until 2005 when the fledgling site bought the domain for $200,000 from aboutface.com a web and intranet directory software company.

Not for everyone?
Facebook might have around 150 million users today, but when it first started the site was restricted to an elite few. If you were a student of Harvard College then you were lucky. Within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.

A place to make friends and influence people?
The limit's 5000, but Facebook states the average person has 120 friends which they can then subject to drunken pictures and status updates. Over 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States with all those people spending a whopping 5703 years (3 billion minutes) on the site each day.

It's not for sale?
"We're not really looking to sell the company. ... we're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company", Zuckerberg said in 2007. The company still remains independent, however that hasn't stopped it selling stakes in the company to investors. Microsoft waded in with $240 million to snap up a 1.6% share in 2007, while Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million also in 2007. The company has received VC funding along the way.

More than just a social network?
Hoping to become a platform in its own right, Facebook has 52,000 applications currently available created by more than 660,000 developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries. Get past the apps and it's become a major destination on the web too. While Barrack Obama was being signed in, there were 8500 status updates the minute Obama began his speech with around 4000 a minute for the duration of the broadcast.