Grew from college to college

Facebook was set apart from other social networking sites in that it grew from college to college,
using a dot-edu email address as verification of a new users identity and collegiate aliation.

Other services did not have explicit divisions within the overall network, nor an expansion strategy
that targeted colleges. Facebook allowed users to restrict who could access their profiles: friends,
friends of friends, and certain networks of users.

Facebook hit 1 million users in December 2004. By May 2005, the site had 2.8 million users at
more than 800 colleges.

Its growth reportedly sparked a bidding war among a dozen venture capital firms eager to
participate in Facebooks success. The winner was Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million
in a deal valuing Facebook at $100 million. Thrilled, Accel partner Jim Breyer praised the
Facebook management team as intellectually honest and breathtakingly brilliant in understanding
the college student experience.
Features
Each new feature tacitly invited speculation about Facebooks strategic intent in creating and
releasing it. For example, when Messages launched, many wondered if it would ultimately be an
e-mail killer. When Usernames launched, observers speculated that Facebook would soon
supplant or replace independent business websites.
When Facebook announced Open Graph in April 2010, pundits immediately hailed it as a clear
eort to make Facebook the centerpiece of any individuals Web experience.Launched with 30
external site partners,. It allowed users to Like external content, such as a news article on
CNN.com, and that activity would be treated just as a Like was within the Facebook site, i.e.
published to users walls and News Feeds. Users friends would also see on the article itself on
the external site that the user had Liked it. Open Graph spanned news articles to e- commerce
sites, movie and music sites, sports teams, and more. Crucially, Open Graph allowed users to
individually opt in to each external site and allow activity on it to be announced back to Facebook.
Analysts concluded that as a result of Open Graph:
Facebook can essentially build a database of anyones Likes that ranges across all categories.
Most importantly, because of Facebooks focus on authenticity, the suggestions generated by
Facebooks database are much more likely to be useful to a user (and advertisers).
F8 Platform
Facebook launched a platform called F8 in May 2007 for developers to build applications that
could run within the site.

F8 allowed third-party developers to create applications that users could then add to the six
standard Facebook applications: photos, events, groups, gifts, birthdays, and marketplace (also
launched in May).

F8 launched with 85 applications from 65 partners including Microsoft and Amazon. By June 2007
40,000 developers had launched more than 1,500 new Facebook applications.

Zynga launched what is considered its best-known game, FarmVille, on Facebook in June 2009,[9] reaching
10 million daily active users (DAU) within six weeks.[10] As of early January 2013, Zynga games had over 265
million monthly active users (MAU),[5] and three of the top five Facebook games (in terms of MAU, according
to AppData) were Zynga titles: FarmVille 2, Texas HoldEm Poker (now known as Zynga Poker), and
ChefVille.[11] According to the BBC, around 80 percent of Zynga's revenue comes from Facebook users.

Users metadata (Facebook Social Graph)

Zuckerberg introduced to the public, a concept called the social graph as foundational
to the Facebook user experience and to the sites growth potential.

Zuckerberg described Facebook as the largest social graph in the world.

On pace to hit 50 million users by the end of 2007, Facebook was adding 100,000 new
users a day.

The company had a record of all the links among its members, as well as the members
links to sites and places outside of the network.

This data constituted Facebooks social graph, a highly leverageable asset for Facebook
and a tremendous advantage it had, that the other companies seeking to reach anyone
who was in the Facebook network.

Simply put, Facebook had more information about peoples relationships and preferences
than any other business did. Moreover, it was voluntarily given and highly reliable.
Zuckerberg described:
"The Facebook platform is optimized for building applications in Facebook, and with more
value for people to develop on our base than we could do on our own. People are already
building social apps, but they have to reconstruct the social graph all by themselves. We
are going to allow developers worldwide to do complete new things. Today social
networks are completely closed nets.Today we are going to end that. With this [framework]
any developer worldwide can build full applications on top of the social graph inside the
Facebook Platform.