A timeline of events in the life of Facebook

Click here for the article ‘The Zuckerberg decade – 10 years of Facebook’. [divider]

:: Founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his college room mates.

:: The ultra-exclusive site was rolled out to a mainstream audience on September 26 2006, for those at least 13 years old with a valid email address.

:: By June 2009, users were given the chance to register their own personalised domain with Facebook, in the same way Twitter has user-specific handles.

:: In January 2012, Facebook announced plans to introduce the timeline facility – prompting suggestions it was moving closer to Twitter.

:: Facebook Inc began selling stock to the public and trading on the Nasdaq in May 2012.

:: According to latest figures, around 9% of users are reckoned to be fake.

:: It joined the Fortune 500 list – a compilation for investors to gauge the relative size of the operations of companies – for the first time on the list published in May 2013, being placed at position 462.

:: In September, Facebook apologised after a dating advertisement featuring the photo of a Canadian teenager who died after months of bullying was posted on its site.

:: Plans announced in October allowing users to open their profiles to strangers angered campaigners, who voiced concerned about cyber-bullying and sexual predators.

:: That month, David Cameron said Facebook bosses had some explaining to do, describing them as ”irresponsible”, for lifting a ban on videos of beheadings being posted on its site.

:: Social media users were also warned, at the end of last year, they could be inadvertently breaking the law by commenting on court cases online.

:: In December, Facebook rolled out plans to allow video adverts to appear in news feeds, already playing the content.

:: As of January 2014, the company has about 1.2 billion monthly users.