When Facebook first came on the scene twenty years ago, it was just a basic place for young people to hang out. But in the intervening years, it has grown into a formidable monster that is ravenous for your attention.
“I will never forget the day that I ran up to my high school’s Mac lab and signed up for Facebook,” Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told AFP.
“You simultaneously felt that you were part of this small, exclusive community where your parents, grandparents and teachers weren’t — but also part of something much larger.”
When Mark Zuckerberg and three friends first launched the website as thefacebook.com on February 4, 2004, it was only available to Harvard College students.
Before going public in 2006, it was made available to students at other US universities.
Facebook developed into a platform for connecting with almost anybody, anywhere, and by 2023, it was claimed that over 3 billion people utilized it each month. “When Facebook first launched, it was revolutionary,” stated Enberg.
“It’s hard to overstate the impact that Facebook has had on shaping everything from pop culture to politics to how we behave online.”
She brought up the well-known “feed” on Facebook, which displayed images, comments, and other “posts” that the social media platform’s algorithm thought would catch users’ attention.
The social network might provide more lucrative advertisements to consumers based on the massive quantity of information they shared on Facebook the more active users were on it.
It’s acknowledged that it facilitated the “go viral” trend of content and online-only news providers.
