February 4, When Mark Zuckerberg Launched “TheFacebook”

Mark Zuckerberg launched “TheFacebook” on February 4, 2004, out of his cramped Harvard dorm room. He was just 19, a sophomore, coding late into the night while the rest of the campus slept.

That tiny room ended up shaping the future of social media. The early version of the site was bare-bones. Harvard students could build profiles, post photos, and find each other online.

The response? Immediate. By the end of the first day, more than 1,200 students had joined. Fast forward a few weeks, and half the undergrads were on board. Zuckerberg didn’t build it alone. Eduardo Saverin chipped in $1,000 to get the site off the ground, matching Zuckerberg’s own investment.

Dustin Moskovitz handled the coding, Chris Hughes handled promotion, and Andrew McCollum put together the first logo. Funny thing—the idea behind TheFacebook wasn’t exactly new. Harvard already had printed “face books” with student photos.

Before this, Zuckerberg had built Facemash, a site where students voted on who was more attractive. That stunt landed him in hot water with the university. But TheFacebook caught on fast.

By March, students at Columbia, Stanford, and Yale were signing up. The site just kept spreading. By the end of the year, it had reached dozens of schools. A year later, they dropped “The” and just called it Facebook. The rest is history.

Today, the platform connects billions of people worldwide. Still, it all began in a single dorm room at Harvard, with a college sophomore who reimagined how we connect.