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On February 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a student at Harvard University, created TheFacebook. com, a social network for his fellow students.
Twenty years after its launch, social media giant Facebook continues to display unprecedented staying power after burying its early competitors like MySpace and Friendster and gaining a foothold in the burgeoning social media landscape. Facebook has more than 2 billion daily active users and has retained abundant prominence. occupying an intermediate level in many of our cultural and political debates.
Facebook differs from other leading social platforms in its initial exclusivity and in the gamification of social relationships through likes, comments, shares and the number of friends, with the help of a news feed that informs users about the lives of their friends and acquaintances.
“From a cultural point of view, there has been a very transparent trend toward gamification of social relationships,” said Pablo Boczkowski, a professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Communication Studies who studies virtual culture. “Facebook has taken advantage of this and intensified it in society through its Success. You can check what other members of your peer organization possess and compare yourself to them, in a way you can’t do in your private life.
In 2004, Facebook was a Harvard-only site. Over the next few months and years, the site expanded, first permitting students from other colleges and universities to sign up, then high schoolers and professionals with corporate email addresses. By 2006, many of its original users had aged out of their initial demographics, prompting Facebook to cast a wider membership net.
“We already have two years of students, and more than a third of the people who use the site are no longer in college,” Zuckerberg told the New York Times in 2006, just before the site opened its doors to anyone in the United States. last years. age. out of 13. “If we can get other young people to use the site, it will add to the fun for everyone. “
Its early and young adult strategy set the tone for Facebook to be a space for Millennials to gather with family, friends, and friends of friends, announce basic and minor updates about their lives, and spread their reviews about just about anything.
Strong social connection was the linchpin of Facebook, differentiating it from other primordial social media sites.
While MySpace gained popularity by allowing users to create profiles and meet new people, Facebook’s priority was expanding networks through real-life acquaintances.
MySpace, which was the most popular social networking site between 2005 and 2008, also focused on music: artists posted their songs on the platform, and users curated playlists and sent songs to their friends online. The platform has tried to identify itself as a music destination.
Far Facebook, a new group of investors, including singer Justin Timberlake, bought the platform in 2011. MySpace then introduced a free music player with access to 42 million songs, what the company called the largest collection of free music on the Internet.
It was too little, too late. MySpace’s monthly active users had trickled down to an estimated 35 million in mid-2011, according to a Comscore report at the time. In contrast, by September of that year, Facebook was seeing almost 800 million monthly active users.
A server migration error in 2019 still spelled the end of MySpace, even though the platform remains active. The malfunction resulted in the loss of 50 million songs, in addition to audio and video files, downloaded by users in the last 12 years.
Friendster, a social networking site introduced in 2002, also failed to survive: it ceased operations in June 2015 after switching to a social gaming site years earlier. Facebook is similar to Friendster in that it emphasized maintaining connections with friends and sharing mutual interests.
But a 2013 study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich found a key factor leading to the site’s downfall was its newer members not having strong connections to others, weakening the social fabric and the resilience of the platform, which relied on active engagement among users.
The researchers also blamed Friendster’s design and configuration for its decline. “At some point in 2009, Friendster introduced changes in its user interface, coinciding with some technical problems, and the rise of popularity of Facebook,” they wrote. “This led to the fast decrease of active users in the community, ending on its discontinuation in 2011.”
As MySpace and Friendster lose steam, Facebook is gaining momentum in innovation and acquisitions.
“In a sector of the economy in the process of conversion, to exist for 20 years is a remarkable feat,” Boczkowski said. “It turns out that Facebook, as a company, is pretty smart about paying attention to what consumers need and what’s coming. “with an optimized product. It was incredibly agile and successful.
Updating the user interface and design is surely mandatory for virtual companies to succeed, Boczkowski noted, noting, by comparison, that “Google has replaced much less. We’re seeing a lot more tweaking in social media companies.
As for Facebook, “we’ve noticed a lot of tweaks over the years, not all of them successful, but we’re seeing a very different platform than what started,” he said.
In April 2012, the company acquired photo-focused social media platform Instagram for around $1 billion. Just a month later, Facebook went public at $38 per share. On Friday, shares of Meta Platforms Inc. (META), which heeded its call in 2021, as the parent company of Facebook and other apps, closed at about $475.
Part of Meta’s longevity can be attributed to its investment in messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which it bought in 2014 for $16 billion. The company also expanded into tech hardware in 2014, buying virtual reality company Oculus for $2 billion.
“For a large portion of the world’s population, the ability to use a telecommunications company for free is an incredibly inexpensive investment,” Boczkowski said of WhatsApp, which is one of the most popular messaging apps in many countries, adding that India, Brazil, Argentina and Italy.
“By providing this service, the company generates a significant level of critical mass. Users can reach everybody using this product,” he added. “Then the company collects the data on how we use it and they devise ways to monetize that.”
Meanwhile, Meta has not relinquished its position as a leader in social media, while Facebook and Instagram compete with TikTok.
And while area for online conversations in real time. , a feature that has long been X’s main promotional point.
Threads attracted tens of millions of users when it was introduced in July, even though engagement declined in the six months that followed.
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