Facebook is a social networking service launched on February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin.[1] The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League,[2] and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States,corporations and by September 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.

According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person". To accomplish this, Mark Zuckerberg hacked the "facebooks" Harvard maintained to help students identify each other and used the images to populate his Facemash website. That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.