Happy Birthday Facebook: The Social Media Giant Turns 12

Facebook turns 12 today

Facebook turns 12 today

Happy Birthday Facebook. Hard to believe, but the social media giant is 12 years old today. Facebook is officially old enough to be that annoying little cousin who won’t stop bothering you at family get togethers. Which come to think of it, is kind of what Facebook is. Those annoying little pings that light up your phone all through the night alerting you that Aunt Marsha invited you to play Candy Crush again. Ah, how nice – and yet we are all still clinging to our phones for dear life in hopes of getting some earth-shattering news or at least all the latest gossip.

As annoying as Facebook can be, we apparently can’t live without it. What else would keep you entertained on long car rides, or save you from acknowledging those awkward romantic movies moments while the kids are in the room?

We all know the CEO and founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest billionaires alive. It all started in his dorm room at Harvard, along with roommates Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Andrew McCollum. The 2010 film “The Social Network” traced the birth of this behemoth, the lawsuit that followed it’s overnight success, and the world dominance of the company which was once called The Facebook and was exclusively for Ivy League college students.

Apart from inspiring movies and books, Facebook has shaped our lives in more ways than one. Sites such as Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram are all social media giants that have drawn inspiration from Facebook. Myspace created in 2003 (a year prior to Facebook) made social networking mainstream by becoming popular among teens in the mid 2000s, a time when Facebook was known as “Myspace for old people” (at least it was in my middle school).

However, Facebook quickly flipped the script becoming the more popular of the two sites, an accomplishment many social media experts and economist credit to the management corporation White Space which allowed Zuckerberg to guide the website in whatever direction the people wanted rather than pigeonholing the company as a “social entertainment” website the way Myspace did. Personally, we think it was the Poke button that did the trick, though.

But whether you use Facebook for annoying people with Candy Crush or Farmville, or to connect with old and new Friends, 1 billion people can’t be wrong. So Happy Birthday, Facebook. We can barely remember a time when you weren’t here – and thanks for sharing all those awesome singing goat videos…

–By Kaitlyn Holzworth

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