10 Years of Face Book
| Time period | Key developments at Facebook |
|---|---|
| January 2004-September 2006 | Facebook gradually enlarges the set of people who are allowed to register, starting from Harvard University only in January 2004, then gradually expanding to more US universities, then moving to international student networks, and finally switching to open registration in September 2006: anybody who is at least 13 and has a valid email address can sign up. |
| September 2006 onward | Even as Facebook's userbase keeps increasing, the eligibility requirements for Facebook remain largely the same. At some point, Facebook starts allowing people to register with either an email address or a mobile phone, thereby making it possible for people who do not have email addresses to register. |
Product and accessibility
| Time period | Key developments at Facebook |
|---|---|
| 2005 onward, but largely concentrated September 2006 - September 2009 | Facebook develops some of the core social infrastructure that would come to define the user experience for many years to come, starting with photos and the ability to tag friends in them (October and December 2005), Facebook's News Feed (September 2006), and them proceeding to Facebook Platform in May 2007, an attempt to get developers to create applications for use within Facebook. The ability to @-tag friends in posts and comments is introduced in September 2009. |
| Concentrated 2009-2011 | Facebook works on becoming the "social layer" of the web, with the (now deprecated) name Facebook Connect, that allows Facebook's like buttons to be displayed on external websites, and also allows them to use Facebook for logins. |
| Concentrated 2012 onward, with some early moves in 2010 and 2011 | Facebook shifts attention to mobile phones. At the low end of the market, this includes initiatives such as Facebook Zero and Facebook for SIM. At the high end, this includes development and improvement of iOS and Android apps, as well as initiatives such as Facebook Home and Facebook Paper (the latter, in January 2014, is the first product of Facebook Creative Labs, Facebook's in-house initiative for small teams to work on standalone mobile apps). Facebook also acquires a number of mobile-focused companies, such as Instagram, and fails to acquire Snapchat. |
| Late 2011 onward | Facebook reimagines some of its core infrastructure, replacing the profile and wall with the new Timeline, and replacing search with Facebook Graph Search. A plan to significantly redesign the News Feed, announced March 2013, is abandoned a few months later. |
| 2013 onward | Facebook moves more aggressively into Twitter territory: it launches support for hashtags and hashtag-based search, and also introduces trending topics. |
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