56 Fun Facts About Facebook

Which Facebook rival did News Corp buy for $580 million in 2005, then sell for about $35 million?

Myspace went to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake in 2011, and Rupert Murdoch later called the purchase a 'huge mistake'.

Which company has owned Facebook since the parent firm renamed itself in 2021?

Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, Inc., named itself after the metaverse, the blend of virtual and physical worlds it plans to build.

Which photo-sharing app did Facebook buy in April 2012, paying in cash and stock?

Instagram cost about $1 billion, and in 2020 the FTC sued Facebook, arguing that buying the young rival had helped protect its monopoly.

Which messaging app did Facebook agree to buy for about $19 billion in February 2014?

WhatsApp's co-founder Brian Acton left Facebook in 2017 after clashing over plans to make money from the app, then publicly backed #DeleteFacebook in 2018.

Which virtual-reality startup did Facebook buy in March 2014?

Oculus VR, maker of the Rift headset, was bought for about $2 billion; its technology became the basis of the Quest line.

Which Facebook button was known internally as the 'Awesome' button before its 2009 launch?

The Like button was called the 'Awesome' button in development until Zuckerberg renamed it, and it went live on February 9, 2009.

Which Facebook reaction was added in April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The Care reaction, a face hugging a heart, launched in April 2020 as a way to show support during the pandemic; it joined Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry, introduced in February 2016.

Which 2010 film dramatised the founding of Facebook?

The Social Network had Armie Hammer play both Winklevoss twins, digitally grafting his face onto body double Josh Pence in post-production.

Who played Zuckerberg in the 2010 film about Facebook's founding?

Jesse Eisenberg was Oscar-nominated for the role; he and Zuckerberg finally met on Saturday Night Live in January 2011, when Zuckerberg made a surprise cameo during Eisenberg's hosting stint.

Which US law is why Facebook and other sites bar children under 13?

COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, makes collecting data on under-13s costly, so many sites bar them; Facebook has required users to be 13 since 2006.

Facebook Stories disappear after how many hours?

Facebook Stories vanish after 24 hours; the feature was tested in a single country in January 2017 before a global rollout that March.

In which California city is Facebook's headquarters?

Facebook moved to Menlo Park in 2011, taking over a former tech campus that it has since expanded with Frank Gehry-designed buildings.

What was the name of the 2003 site Zuckerberg built to rate students' attractiveness?

Facemash paired photos from Harvard's online directories and asked which student was hotter; it was shut down within days after student groups complained.

Which venture capitalist made Facebook's first outside investment in 2004?

Peter Thiel's $500,000 angel investment in August 2004 bought 10.2 percent of the company and a board seat.

Which Napster co-founder became Facebook's president in 2004?

Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster with Shawn Fanning, negotiated Facebook's early funding so that Zuckerberg kept control of the board.

To which city did Facebook move its base of operations in June 2004?

Zuckerberg and colleagues moved to a rented house in Palo Alto in June 2004, putting the company next to the Silicon Valley investors who would soon fund it.

What did Zuckerberg wear to meet investors before Facebook's 2012 IPO?

Zuckerberg wore a hoodie rather than a business suit on the roadshow, drawing criticism; the shares still priced at $38, valuing Facebook at $104 billion.

Technical problems on which exchange delayed the start of trading in Facebook stock on its first day?

Nasdaq's systems left Facebook orders stuck for hours, and the botched debut cost the exchange a $10 million SEC fine, then the largest ever against an exchange.

What valuation did Microsoft's 2007 purchase of a $240 million stake imply for Facebook?

The $240 million bought 1.6% and implied a $15 billion valuation; the deal also gave Microsoft rights to sell international advertising on the site.

Who became Facebook's chief operating officer in March 2008?

Sheryl Sandberg left Google to become COO in March 2008; her brainstorming sessions with staff settled how the site would make money: advertising.

What was Facebook's name before it bought the facebook.com domain for $200,000 in 2005?

TheFacebook dropped 'The' from its name once the company owned facebook.com, bought for $200,000 in 2005.

What was the name of the algorithm that once ranked stories in Facebook's News Feed?

EdgeRank weighed affinity, edge weight and time decay to rank News Feed stories; it was presented at the f8 conference in 2010 and later replaced by machine-learning models.

What did Facebook call the open-source programming language it announced in March 2014?

Hack, a PHP-derived language running on Facebook's HHVM virtual machine, grew out of the struggle to scale PHP; much of the site already ran on it before the March 2014 release.

At which October 2021 conference did Zuckerberg announce a new name for Facebook's parent company?

Facebook Connect is where Zuckerberg said the old name was so tightly linked to one product that it couldn't represent everything the company did.

Which game company made FarmVille, the 2009 farming game that swept Facebook?

Zynga's FarmVille had over 80 million players by early 2010 and was the first Facebook game to reach 10 million daily users.

How large was the fine the FTC imposed on Facebook in July 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica affair?

The FTC's $5 billion penalty was then the largest ever imposed for violating consumer privacy, and came with a 20-year settlement order requiring new privacy oversight.

Which whistleblower exposed Cambridge Analytica's use of data from up to 87 million Facebook accounts?

Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, went public in March 2018, and more than $100 billion was knocked off Facebook's market value within days.

Which company held serious talks to buy Facebook in September 2006, with prices reaching $1bn?

Yahoo was turned down, as Zuckerberg refused to sell; Facebook stayed independent and went public in 2012.

Which cryptocurrency exchange did the Winklevoss twins found after settling their lawsuit against Facebook?

Gemini was founded in 2014 by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, six years after their Facebook settlement, reportedly valued at $65 million.

Which Facebook co-founder wrote a 2019 New York Times op-ed calling for the company to be broken up?

Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg's college roommate, wrote that the most problematic aspect of Facebook's power was Mark's unilateral control over speech.

The Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for which rival site?

HarvardConnection, later renamed ConnectU, was the site they had asked Zuckerberg to help build; the dispute ended in a 2008 settlement reportedly worth $65 million.

Facebook's 2011 headquarters move was onto the former campus of which company?

The campus had belonged to Sun Microsystems; Facebook kept Sun's old sign at the entrance, turned around so the back faced visitors, as a reminder of what happens to companies that stop innovating.

Which motto, coined by Zuckerberg, did Facebook retire in 2014?

'Move fast and break things' gave way to the far less catchy 'Move fast with stable infra', short for infrastructure.

What caused the October 4, 2021 outage that took every Facebook-owned app offline for hours?

A BGP route withdrawal made Facebook's DNS servers unreachable after a maintenance command cut its backbone, and engineers had to reach data-centre servers in person to reset them.

Which former Facebook product manager leaked the internal documents behind The Wall Street Journal's 'Facebook Files'?

Frances Haugen told the US Senate in October 2021 that Facebook's products harm children, stoke division and weaken democracy.

Which text-based app did Facebook's parent company launch in July 2023 as a rival to Twitter?

Threads passed 100 million users in its first five days, beating ChatGPT's record as the fastest-growing consumer app, then lost over 80% of daily users within weeks.

Which family of large language models did Facebook's parent company release, with a second version in July 2023?

Llama 2 was released in July 2023 under a licence allowing many commercial uses, with Microsoft as a launch partner.

Which regulator ordered the unwinding of Facebook's 2020 purchase of GIF platform Giphy?

The UK Competition and Markets Authority forced the sale, and Giphy went to Shutterstock in 2023 for $53 million, after Facebook had paid a reported $400 million.

Which eyewear brand launched camera-equipped smart glasses with Facebook in September 2021?

Ray-Ban Stories had cameras for photos and video, plus a hardwired LED that lights up so people nearby know they are being recorded.

What did young Zuckerberg call the program linking his home computers to his father's dental office?

ZuckNet let computers at the family home and his father's dental office message each other; AOL and Microsoft later showed interest in buying Synapse, his high-school music player.

In which of Harvard's residential houses did Zuckerberg live when he built the site?

Kirkland House was home to the dorm room where Zuckerberg launched Facebook in February 2004, with roommate Dustin Moskovitz among its co-founders.

Who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 2010 film about Facebook's founding?

Aaron Sorkin signed on to write it after reading just three pages of the book proposal.

The 2010 Facebook film was adapted from The Accidental Billionaires, a book by which author?

Ben Mezrich's earlier book, Bringing Down the House, told the story of the MIT blackjack team and became the 2008 film 21.

Which duo composed the score for the 2010 film about Facebook's founding?

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won the Oscar for the score, though Reznor had first turned the job down after coming off tour, planning to take time off.

Under what name did Facebook's instant messaging service launch in 2008?

Facebook Chat launched in April 2008 as a browser-based instant messenger; it became the standalone Messenger app in August 2011 while remaining part of the website.

Facebook's Messenger Rooms launched in April 2020 with no time limit to take on which booming video-call app?

Zoom's pandemic popularity prompted Messenger Rooms, which let up to 50 people video chat with no time limit.

Facebook Home, unveiled in April 2013, was a user-interface layer for which operating system?

Facebook Home ran on Android and came preloaded on the HTC First, whose price AT&T slashed to 99 cents about a month after launch.

Which rival's encrypted traffic did Facebook's secret 2016 Onavo project intercept and analyse?

Snapchat's encrypted traffic, Zuckerberg complained in a 2016 email, left Facebook with no analytics on a fast-growing rival; the fix was nicknamed Project Ghostbusters after its ghost logo.

Pressure from which company led Facebook to pull its Onavo Protect VPN app in August 2018?

Apple said Onavo Protect broke App Store rules against harvesting data about other apps, data Facebook had used to spot fast-growing rivals.

What was the name of the stablecoin cryptocurrency project Facebook founded in 2019?

Libra was announced in June 2019 with Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber among its backers; the first three quit that October, and it was renamed Diem before being wound down in 2022.

Which Harvard student agreed to match Zuckerberg's $1,000 investment before Facebook launched in 2004?

Eduardo Saverin, a Harvard economics student, put in $1,000 to match Zuckerberg's and became the first CFO; Moskovitz, McCollum and Hughes joined soon after to manage the site's rapid growth.

About how many monthly active users did Facebook report for December 2023?

Facebook reported about 3 billion monthly active users (3.07 billion) for December 2023, and it was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.

Which world leader did Facebook suspend after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol?

Donald Trump's ban became a two-year suspension after Facebook's Oversight Board rejected an open-ended penalty, and his accounts were restored in early 2023.

What did Facebook launch in May 2015 to let people read news stories without leaving the site?

Instant Articles loaded publishers' stories inside Facebook's app, but The Guardian, one of its first partners, dropped the format in 2017.

Facebook's Internet.org initiative, founded in 2013, offered a low-bandwidth service under what name?

Free Basics offered a stripped-down set of sites without data charges; India's telecom regulator effectively banned it in February 2016 after a net-neutrality backlash.

In 2020, which government made Facebook block access to the million-member 'Royalist Marketplace' group?

Thailand's government ordered Facebook to restrict access to the Royalist Marketplace group, run by exiled academic Pavin Chachavalpongpun, in August 2020; Facebook complied but said it would challenge the order in court.