Facebook is a social networking website founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes in Cambridge Massachussetts USA. Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, in the Greater Boston area.

Prior to creating Facebook.com, Mark Zuckerberg created Facemash website in October 28, 2003 when he was a sophomore student at Harvard University. Facemash is a website where members are solely Harvard students. This website features 2 pictures seated next to each other and users are asked to choose which person is hotter.

After facemash gained popularity, it was shut down by the havard administration and Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy for hacking into the administration's restricted computers to gain access to the photos and private info which he used in facemash. Eventually, the charge was dropped.

On the next semester, in January 2004, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website and in February 4, 2004 he launched "Thefacebook" with a domain name www.thefacebook.com. Thefacebook was named and was inspired by his contoversial first project which was the the Facemash.

Six days after the launching of the website, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, complained and accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. They later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg.

Thefacebook.com membership was first restricted to Harvard College Students only. Soon after its launching, thefacebook member database has widely expanded and Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website.

Thefacebook.com welcomed members from Stanford, Columbia, and Yale universities. Then its door opened to all Ivy League schools, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.

The company became a corporation in the summer of 2004 and moved its base in Palo Alto California in June of the same year. The first advertising opportunity thefacebook.com received was by Pay-pal.

thefacebook.com became "facebook.com" after the company purchased the domain name in 2005 amounting to $200,000.00.

The expansion continued embracing high school version then to company employees including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.

Finally on September 26, 2006, facebook.com was opened to everyone of ages 13 and older.

In 2007, facebook.com was worth millions already. Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million. Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.

Facebook earned revenue by serving banner ads on every page of each facebook account holder.

Facebook has approximately 1,400 employees and offices in eight countries.

Mark Zuckerberg owns 24% of the company, Accel Partners owns 10%, Dustin Moskovitz owns 6%, Digital Sky Technologies owns 5%, Eduardo Saverin owns 5%, Sean Parker owns 4%, Peter Thiel owns 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners own between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft owns 1.3%, Li Ka-shing owns 0.75%, the Interpublic Group owns less than 0.5%, a small group of current and former employees own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Nata, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company, and the remaining 30% or so are owned by employees and outside investors.

Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.