Inside Facebook

It was 5 years ago tomorrow that Mark Zuckerberg founded Thefacebook.com along with fellow Harvard classmates Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin. 1,800 days and 150,000,000 users later, Facebook has become one of the most heavily used and trusted websites in the world.

Facebook’s accomplishments to date are truly impressive. Not only has the company built a social utility accepted across global cultures, but it has also established unprecedented trust with users who are comfortable sharing more and more personal information every day.

In fact, Facebook also released updated stats on information shared by Facebook users today:

• 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• 850 million photos are uploaded to the site each month
• 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
• 3.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
• The average user has 120 Facebook friends

Reflecting on the company’s 5 year anniversary, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:

The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn’t consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.

Why is it important to us to keep building better ways for people to share information? Enabling efficient sharing is important because it makes the world more open, and this gives everyone a voice to express ideas and initiate change.

In order to celebrate the milestone, Facebook will be offering users a free “Thank You” virtual gift in the Facebook Gift Shop which they can send to their Facebook friends. “In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.

Can’t remember how Facebook has changed along the way? Here’s a quick retrospective on the changing Facebook profile page through the years, from 2005 to 2009: