Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself

6. Facebook: Developing a Community of Friends

Imagine a single lamp lighting a desk deep in the dormitories of Harvard University. A scrawny college student types at a computer, working on a computer science project with his roommates. In 2004, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg began developing a new kind of website for fellow students to track their social lives. It quickly caught on among students, and membership was first expanded to include Stanford, Yale, and Columbia universities and then to most universities across the United States and Canada. By 2006, the site was called Facebook, and anyone around the world could join this social networking phenomenon.¹ What does 900 million represent? It’s the number of people currently using Facebook ...