February 2004: Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook. A social network exclusively for Harvard University
September 2004: Facebook launches the Wall, one of its most exciting and popular features, which allows users to post happenings on their profile pages.
September 2006: Facebook opens to the public and begins letting anyone older than 13 join. Earlier it was restricted to colleges, schools and companies. Also introduces News Feed, which collects all the feeds of user postings in one place. This is around the period when new user adoption explodes.
May 2007: The second big initiative that propels Facebook into the big league; it launches Platform, which allows programmers to build apps. Facebook explodes with a thousands and thousands of small apps that include games, quizzes and music. Platform ensures that Facebook does not to have to do all the heavy-lifting on its own but provide other companies the means to do it.
October 2007: Microsoft comes calling with a $240 million investment for a 1.6 per cent stake valuing Facebook at an astonishing $15 billion
November 2007: Facebook falters for the first time when it introduces its advertising program Beacon, a feature that broadcast user activities from external websites on Facebook. It lead to a huge backlash forcing Facebook to withdraw the initiative immediately.
March 2008: Facebook hires Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer from rival company Google. In hindsight this is one of the best decisions that Zuckerberg made helping his company scale from hot tech startup to serious corporate heavyweight.
February 2009: Facebook introduces its Like feature. One of the most used features on the social network, it brings user preferences into everything that they consume on the site.
June 2009: Facebook beats MySpace to become the king of the social networking world.
September 2011: Always innovating even when there is user resistance, Facebook introduces the Timeline, which is a new version of the user profile page.
February 2012: Facebook ends months of speculation by filing for an initial public offering (IPO)
April 2012: Facebook snaps up photo app company Instagram for $1 billion.
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