A Great story behind building the biggest "The Facebook"..

Facebook, as you know its know the no. 1 social networking portal having more visitors than Google. Facebook was officially launched in February 2004. The website's name "Facebook" stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Where it Stands Now in the world..?

Website: www.facebook.com
Revenue: US$800 million (2009 est.)
Key People: Mark Zuckerberg (CEO), Sherley Sandberg (COO)
Employees: 1400+
Alexa Rank: 2 (As of 14th july 2010)
Users: 400 million (Active in Feb 2010)

When reading the above statistics about facebook it feels good, but Mark Zuckerberg never had thought of those statistics when he just designed a website to share photos. Its name was Facemash, the predecessor to facebook. He expanded on his initial project and he launched "Thefacebook" on Feb 4, 2004 originally located at "thefacebook.com". Initially it was open to only students of Harvard College. In March 2004 thefacebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia and Yale. And gradually it expanded to all schools and universities throughout Canada and USA. It removed its "The" from its name after purchasing the domain facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000. Traffic to Facebook has increased exponentially since 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010. Most of its revenues comes from its advertisements which is served by its flyers application.
What i told above is a very small description from the beginning to the present. The evolution from "thefacebook" to facebook.com is really a great journey. Ben Mezrich (Author) brings the great journey of how facebook was founded in a book titled - "The Accidental Billionaires - The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal". you can download the book for free and directly from the below hotfile link.