Facebook on its 10th birthday

Jemima Kiss reports on the first ten years of Facebook, which was launched from Mark Zuckerberg’s student digs on 4 February 2004.

By the end of 2013, Facebook was being used by 1.23 billion users worldwide, adding 170 million in just one year.

Yet the scale of the ambition is a far cry from when Zuckerberg was an ambitious and competitive freshman at Harvard. Immortalised in The Social Network, Zuckerberg launched the site from his dorm room on 4 February 2004 – a technological replacement for a college directory and messages left on student doors.

It was a hit almost immediately, although in today’s terms the early progress sounds modest. In 2006, Facebook already had 12 million users across US colleges, 60% of whom logged in every day. But by then it was already valued at $100m (£61m).

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg himself may come to be known as the most underestimated man of his generation, steering Facebook from an idea to link students to the default communication platform for the online western world.

The site is now worth $135bn with revenues of $7.87bn in 2013, including $1.5bn in profit. Globally, 556 million people now access the site every day on their smartphone or tablet and at the end of 2013, for the first time, Facebook made more than $1bn in revenue from mobile advertising in just one quarter.

Part of Facebook’s success has been timing, says Dr Bernie Hogan, research fellow at the Oxford internet institute, because the world was ready for a shared list of connections that works like a supercharged, definitive phone book for the digital age. “Before Facebook, we had to cover up our identities online and there was uncertainty over who to trust. Facebook gave us the notion that it was safe, and useful.”

Venture capitalist Saul Klein, who worked with Facebook when with Skype, feels Zuckerberg has been hugely underestimated.

“What Facebook is doing with a site used by 1 billion people a day is an order of magnitude greater than anything – it’s a remarkable feat of engineering,” he said, pointing to the fact that London is still the only English-speaking city in Facebook’s top 10. “It’s not just about the US anymore – tech is now a global phenomenon. I’m not sure even Facebook quite understands that – they are the canary in that coalmine.”

What does all this mean for faith and evangelisation? For what it means to be the Church today?