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2004

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984)

“Facebook, the 800-pound gorilla of the social networking world, is one of the most significant communications platforms of the modern era. While the site was not the first online service that enabled people to exchange information about themselves or publicly promote their interests, it was the service that took the phenomenon global. Facebook raised public awareness about what constituted “social networking” and brought into focus how a simple piece of software could enable the everyday person to have a voice disproportionate to his or her economic position, geographic location, or access to sources of community organization and influence—a voice bounded only by the strength of what he or she had to say.

Facebook also served as a widespread wake-up call to traditional media outlets that their business models were ripe for disruption, as the mass media’s audience flipped and went from being consumers of media to creators. Now suddenly people were their own storytellers, editors, publishers, neighborhood leaders, or global trailblazers with a platform for instantaneous projection of information around the world.

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard students who developed a centralized website to connect students across the university. The early roots of the Facebook site are generally believed to have originated with Zuckerberg’s short-lived “FaceMash” site, which gamified the choice of who was more attractive among pairs of people. The launch of “TheFacebook,” as it was first called, demonstrated that there was an unfulfilled desire to connect with and learn about other people—at least among the Harvard student body. Along the way there were various legal challenges and allegations of idea theft, including a lawsuit by two brothers named Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who ended up with a settlement worth $65 million—chump change, compared to Facebook’s 2017 market value of more than $500 billion.

Facebook quickly expanded beyond Harvard and opened to other universities, eventually turning into a business that was inclusive of anyone who wanted to join. In March 2017, the site had 1.94 billion monthly active user accounts.”

SEE ALSO Blog Is Coined (1999), Social Media Enables the Arab Spring (2011)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill, on April 10, 2018, about the use of Facebook data in the 2016 US presidential election.

Fair Use Sources: B07C2NQSPV

Return to Timeline of the History of Computers

1998

Google

Larry Page (b. 1973), Sergey Brin (b. 1973)

“The seed for what would become Google started with Stanford graduate student Larry Page’s curiosity about the organization of pages on the World Wide Web. Web links famously point forward. Page wanted to be able to go in the other direction.

To go backward, Page built a web crawler to scan the internet and organize all the links, named BackRub for the backlinks it sought to map out. He also recognized that being able to qualify the importance of the links would be of great use as well. Sergey Brin, a fellow graduate student, joined Page on the project, and they soon developed an algorithm that would not only identify and count the links to a page but also rank their importance based on quality of the pages from where the links originated. Soon thereafter, they gave their tool a search interface and a ranking algorithm, which they called PageRank. The effort eventually evolved into a full-blown business in 1998, with revenue coming primarily from advertisers who bid to show advertisements on search result pages.

In the following years, Google acquired a multitude of companies, including a video-streaming service called YouTube, an online advertising giant called DoubleClick, and cell phone maker Motorola, growing into an entire ecosystem of offerings providing email, navigation, social networking, video chat, photo organization, and a hardware division with its own smartphone. Recent research has focused on deep learning and AI (DeepMind), gearing up for the tech industry’s next battle—not over speed, but intelligence.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary both added the word Google as a verb in 2006, meaning to search for something online using the Google search engine. At Google’s request, the definitions refer explicitly to the use of the Google engine, rather than the generic use of the word to describe any internet search.

On October 2, 2015, Google created a parent company to function as an umbrella over all its various subsidiaries. Called Alphabet Inc., the American multinational conglomerate is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has more than 70,000 employees worldwide.”