Facebook - the largest social network in the world

Facebook - the largest social network in the world, with more than 500 million users.Facebook Mark Zuckerberg founded in February 2004, initially as an exclusive social network for Harvard students, could register everyone who had a mailbox at Harvard University.
It was a huge success: 2 weeks after the launch, half of the schools in the Boston area began to demand access to social networking site Facebook. Zuckerberg once invited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, that they help in the development of Facebook, and within four months, access to Facebook, was opened for 30 colleges.

With this success, Zuckerberg, Moskowitz and Hughes moved to Palo Alto during the summer in the flat rent, worked intensively on Facebook.

 A few weeks later, Zuckerberg met with a former co-founder Sean Parker of Napster (Sean Parker). Parker moved to an apartment Zuckerberg, and they began working together. Soon, Parker found the first large-scale investors - Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, which has invested in development of Facebook $ 500 000.
In mid-2004 tried Friendster acquire the company for Zuckerberg's $ 10 million Facebook rejected the proposal and subsequently received U.S. $ 12.7 million investment from Accel Partners.
Facebook continues to grow, and in September 2005, provides access to secondary school students, and next month adds a feature to share photos. In the spring of 2006, Facebook received $ 25 million investment from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, as well as previous investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. At that time, Facebook had included about 20 000 networks of educational institutions, and in September 2006, access was open to all.
In the summer of 2006, Yahoo attempted to acquire the company for $ 1 billion.Zuckerberg made a verbal agreement to sell Facebook, but several days later when the price of Yahoo shares fell, the transaction amount was reduced to U.S. $ 800 million and Zuckerberg refused to sell. It was not the first time Zuckerberg refused to sell Facebook; Viacom tried unsuccessfully to acquire the company for $ 750 million in March 2006.Zuckerberg got the glory, "the child", who refused billion.
Unpleasant moment in the history of Facebook has been a dispute with a social network ConnectU. The founders of ConnectU, a former classmate at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg, claim that Zuckerberg stole their source code for Facebook. The case went to trial.
In spite of this protracted case, the growth of Facebook, the fall of 2007 was simply stunning. More than 1 million new users registered each week, 200,000 daily, and the total number of active users was more than 50 million. Facebook has 40 billion page views a month. Long gone are the days when the social network users were only students. 11% were older than 35 years, more than half attend a social network each day and spend an average of 19 minutes. Facebook, is the sixth most visited site in the U.S. and the leader in photo sharing sites.
In October 2007, Microsoft bought 1.6 percent of shares in the bag $ 240 million, this means that the total price of Facebook at 15 billion dollars. Many explained Microsoft's decision to a desire to outdo Google. Annual revenue at the time Facebook was $ 150 million
In the 3rd quarter of 2010, nearly a quarter of all impressions of banners in the United States had on the social network Facebook.
The main competitors of Facebook is MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tagged, Hi5, Piczo, and Open Social.
To date, the value of Facebook at roughly $ 24 billion