It was a Tuesday. Specifically, February 4, 2004. If you were a Harvard student back then, you weren't thinking about global data privacy or trillion-dollar market caps. You were likely just trying to find a way to see if that person in your Art History seminar was single. That’s the messy, low-stakes reality of the year Facebook was founded.
Mark Zuckerberg was only 19. He was a sophomore.
💡 You might also like: The Quick Way to Change Language on YouTube Without Losing Your Mind
He didn't build it in a vacuum, though the movie The Social Network makes it look like a solo revenge montage. In reality, the site—then called "TheFacebook"—was the result of a frantic week of coding. Zuckerberg had already caused a massive stir on campus with Facemash, a controversial site where students rated classmates' attractiveness. That project almost got him expelled. But it proved one thing: people are obsessed with looking at other people.
Why 2004 changed everything for the internet
Before the year Facebook was founded, the internet felt kind of anonymous. You had screen names on AOL Instant Messenger like SkaterBoy92 or Prettychick01. You didn't use your real name because, frankly, that felt dangerous. Facebook flipped the script. It demanded your real identity. It required a ".edu" email address. This wasn't just a technical requirement; it was a stroke of psychological genius. It created an "in-crowd."
When the site launched in early 2004, it was limited to Harvard. Within twenty-four hours, over a thousand people had signed up. Within a month, half the undergraduate population was on it.
Honestly, the tech wasn't even that revolutionary. Friendster and MySpace already existed. MySpace was actually huge at the time, but it was a chaotic mess of glittering backgrounds and auto-playing music. Facebook was clean. It was blue and white. It felt like a directory, not a basement party. Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin helped Zuckerberg scale it beyond Harvard's gates almost immediately. First to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. Then the rest of the Ivy League. By the end of 2004, they had a million users.
The legal drama you probably forgot
You can't talk about the year Facebook was founded without mentioning the Winklevoss twins. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, along with Divya Narendra, claimed Zuckerberg stole their idea. They had hired him to build a site called HarvardConnection (later ConnectU).
💡 You might also like: How to Copy on iPhone and Paste on Mac: Why This Magic Trick Breaks and How to Fix It
The legal battle lasted for years, but the seeds were sown in those first few weeks of February. While Zuckerberg was telling the twins the site wasn't ready, he was busy registering the domain thefacebook.com. It’s a classic Silicon Valley "move fast and break things" origin story, but with much higher stakes than anyone realized at the time. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, saw the potential early. He dumped $500,000 into the company in the summer of 2004. That was the first big institutional check. It valued the company at $5 million.
Think about that. Five million dollars for a site that was basically a digital yearbook. Today, that seems like a joke.
Beyond the Harvard dorms
By the time 2004 wrapped up, the company had moved its operations to Palo Alto, California. They were living in a rented house, living the stereotypical startup life—coding all night, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and literal kegs in the kitchen. Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, had hopped on board as the company's first president. He was the one who told Zuckerberg to "drop the 'The'."
Just "Facebook."
It sounds cleaner, right? Parker was instrumental in turning a college project into a real business, even if his tenure was plagued by personal controversies. The year Facebook was founded wasn't just about code; it was about a radical shift in how we perceive the "private" and "public" versions of ourselves. We started consenting to being tracked. We started "poking" each other—remember that? It was weird.
The technical hurdles of 2004
The site was originally run on a single server that cost about $85 a month. As thousands of students flooded the site, the servers crashed. Constantly. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz had to manually add schools one by one because the infrastructure couldn't handle a global rollout.
- They used PHP and MySQL.
- The original "Profile" had no Wall.
- There was no News Feed.
- You had to click on a friend's profile specifically to see if they had changed their relationship status.
It was a pull system, not a push system. You went looking for information; the information didn't come hunting for you in an algorithmically curated feed. That didn't happen until 2006. In 2004, the "stalking" was manual labor.
Why this history matters today
We live in the world Facebook built. Whether you love the platform or haven't logged in since 2016, the social graph created in the year Facebook was founded is the foundation of the modern ad-supported web. It turned "data" into the most valuable commodity on earth.
Looking back at 2004 reminds us that massive shifts often start small. It was just a way to see if the girl in the dorm next door was "In a Relationship" or "It's Complicated." From those humble, somewhat cringey beginnings, we got the era of big data, algorithmic echo chambers, and a completely redefined sense of global community.
📖 Related: Ecosia and the Search Engine Plant a Tree Movement: What’s Actually Happening to the Planet
Actions you can take to understand this legacy
If you want to really grasp how much has changed since the year Facebook was founded, do a quick audit of your own digital footprint. It's eye-opening.
- Check your "Off-Facebook Activity": Go into your settings and see how many third-party apps and websites send your data back to Meta. This is the "Social Graph" in action, twenty years later.
- Download your data: Request a copy of your Facebook archive. Look at the very first things you posted. It’s a time capsule of who you were and how the platform has evolved from a directory to a data engine.
- Read the original Terms of Service: If you can find archives from 2004 (check the Wayback Machine), compare them to today’s 15,000-word documents. The simplicity of 2004 is jarring.
- Evaluate your privacy settings: The "real name" culture started in 2004. Decide if you still want to be that "public" in an era where facial recognition and AI are the norms.
The story of 2004 isn't just about a website. It's about the moment we all decided that being "connected" was worth the price of our privacy. We're still paying that bill today.