Back in February of 2004, when 19 year old Mark Zuckerberg launched a social networking website called Facebook.com, no one thought it would change the way people use the internet forever. No one really believed that he was going to change the world with a simple website that allowed college students to interact with each other.

Now 6 years later, Zuckerberg’s website is one of the top 2 or 3 websites in the world. With well over 500 million members, and more traffic than any other website other than Google, Facebook has become one of the biggest internet sensations. Sure, without Facebook, there would be other ways of communicating online with friends, family, and complete strangers. However, Facebook did something that other social networks were not doing at the time. It allowed its members to view news feeds from their friends, and post activities, events, or simply an opinion to their own profile. These posts would then be seen by users’ friends.

“When Facebook first came out, I thought it was stupid. Myspace was so much more popular, mostly because Facebook limited their membership to college students, who had a college email address,” Said Jason Bergman, a 5 year member of Facebook.

Bergman is correct. When Mark Zuckerberg first launched Facebook, only those people that had an active college email address with a “.edu” extension could sign up for an account. This limited the amount of people who could sign up. Even those that did have college email addresses would rather use MySpace.com since more of their non-college friends were on there.

Zuckerberg, who launched Facebook from his college dorm at Harvard University eventually decided to open the social networking website to the general public. Once that happened, it took off like crazy, and today Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world, worth over $4 billion mostly from his 24% share in Facebook.

How has Facebook changed your life?