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It has been 10 years since a Harvard sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg created a website called Thefacebook.com to let his classmates find their friends online.

They did. And in the decade since, so have more than a billion people, not just American college students but also farmers in India, activists in Egypt and pop stars in South Korea.

Facebook has transformed how much of the world communicates. Zuckerberg's insistence that people use real identities, not quirky screen names, helped blur, if not erase entirely, the divide between our online and offline worlds. Long-lost friends are no longer lost. They are on Facebook.

From its roots as a website with no ads, no business plan and a hacker ethic, Facebook has grown into a company worth US$150 billion, with 6337 employees and sprawling headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley. Born in the age of desktop computers, three years before the iPhone's debut, Facebook is now mainly accessed on mobile devices. Many of these mobile users never had a PC.

"People often ask if I always knew that Facebook would become what it is today. No way," Zuckerberg wrote - where else - on his Facebook page Tuesday. "I remember getting pizza with my friends one night in college shortly after opening Facebook. I told them I was excited to help connect our school community, but one day someone needed to connect the whole world."

Facebook has had plenty of stumbles along the way, from privacy concerns to user protests when Facebook introduced new features, not to mention a rocky public stock debut in 2012. Even its origin was the subject of a lawsuit and a Hollywood movie.

So far, though, Facebook has trudged on.

As Facebook enters its second decade, the company faces a new set of challenges in reaching the next billion users, the billion after that, and the one after that, including the majority of the world without internet access. It must also keep the existing set interested even as younger, hipper rivals emerge and try to lure them away.

There are 1.23 billion Facebook users today, or roughly 17 per cent of the world's population. Although that's far from connecting the whole world, Facebook is here to stay. It's reached critical mass.

"One of the things Facebook has been good at is that it's very easy to use and understand," said Paul Levinson, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham University. "It's a much friendlier system than any email system."

Javier Olivan joined Facebook Inc. as vice president of growth and analytics in 2007. It was a different time. Myspace was the dominant online hangout with 200 million members. Facebook had 30 million.

Facebook's user base had been accelerating steadily, Olivan said, as it expanded from Harvard's campus to other colleges, then high schools, and in 2006, anyone over 13. Users in the UK and other English-speaking countries then began signing up.

But around 2007, growth plateaued.

"The thinking at the time was (that) we'll never have 100 million users," Olivan said. "That's when the growth team was created."

If Facebook was going to connect the world, as its mission states, it couldn't be an English-only service. So Facebook turned to its users to help translate the site. A Spanish version came in 2008, followed by dozens of others. Growth accelerated again, and volunteer translators are still adding new tongues, whether that's native African languages or pirate slang.

Facebook got its 100 million users by August 2008 and half a billion two years later. By 2012, a billion people were logging in to Facebook at least once a month.

While sharing photos and updates with friends is a universal experience, Facebook is customised depending on where you live. In Japan, for example, users can list their blood type on their profiles, as it's something that would typically come up in conversation when you meet someone - kind of like horoscopes in the US

Beyond language, another hurdle was mobile. The iPhone came along in 2007, and Facebook's iPhone app soon followed. But the app was slow and buggy, fueling concerns that it wouldn't be able to transform into a "mobile-first" company, as it wanted to be. About the time of its initial public offering of stock, potential investors fretted about its ability to make money from mobile ads.

That's no longer an issue. Facebook's stock is trading near record highs. The majority of the company's advertising revenue now comes from mobile, rather than Web ads.

No doubt other challenges will come.

"At some point there will be barriers such as illiteracy, (creating) hardware for people who can't read and write," Olivan said.

Content on the internet will have to be translated into languages that are barely represented online today.

"That's why this is a 10-year undertaking," he said. "The entire industry has to tackle the problem."

On any given day, 81 per cent of Facebook's users are outside the US and Canada.

"My day is not complete without checking my Facebook account," said Syaiful Anwar, a 47-year-old restaurant owner in Pekanbaru on Indonesia's Sumatra island. "To find out what is happening in this world, to bring together my friends and relatives (is) now just a click (of a) mouse away."

Indonesia has 65 million users who log in at least once a month. That's about a quarter of the country's population. India boasts another 93 million.

As Facebook's user base started growing in emerging markets, another hurdle emerged: the high cost of smartphones and internet access. So, in 2011, Facebook launched an app called Facebook for Every Phone. It lets people without fancy smartphones access the most popular features, such as reading status updates and sharing photos. More than 100 million people use it each month.

Facebook is the first internet experience for many people in India and other emerging markets, said Kevin D'Souza, Facebook's growth manager in India. That means people who have never used email are signing up for Facebook, using their phone numbers instead of an email address to log in.

"Facebook addresses a universal need," D'Souza said. "Everybody around the world wants to connect with people they care about."

Last year, Facebook launched internet.org, aimed at getting everyone in the world online.

"When I reflect on the last 10 years, one question I ask myself is: why were we the ones to build this? We were just students. We had way fewer resources than big companies. If they had focused on this problem, they could have done it," Zuckerberg wrote Tuesday. "The only answer I can think of is: we just cared more."

As far as birthdays go, Facebook's brought out reflection, nostalgia and lots of memories.

Connie Zong, who signed up for Facebook during her sophomore year at Harvard 10 years ago, remembers when she heard that Zuckerberg was dropping out of Harvard to work on Facebook.

"I remember thinking that guy is making such a big mistake," she said. "He's giving up a really great degree at a great university, and we're never going to hear from him again." 

KEY EVENTS IN FACEBOOK HISTORY

❏ February 2004: Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.            

❏ March 2004: Facebook begins allowing people from other colleges and universities to join.

❏ June 2004: Facebook moves its headquarters to Palo Alto, California.

❏ September 2004: Facebook introduces the Wall, which allows people to write personal musings and other tidbits on profile pages. Facebook becomes the target of a lawsuit claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea for the social network from a company co-founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a third person at Harvard.

❏ September 2005: Facebook expands to include high schools.

❏ May 2006: Facebook introduces additional networks, allowing people with corporate email addresses to join.

❏ September 2006: Facebook begins letting anyone over 13 join. It also introduces News Feed, which collects friends' Wall posts in one place. Although it leads to complaints about privacy, News Feed would become one of Facebook's most popular features.

❏ May 2007: Facebook launches Platform, a system for letting outside programmers develop tools for sharing photos, taking quizzes and playing games. The system gives rise to a Facebook economy and allows companies such as game maker Zynga Inc. to thrive.

❏ October 2007: Facebook agrees to sell a 1.6 per cent stake to Microsoft for US$240 million and forges an advertising partnership.

❏ November 2007: Facebook unveils its Beacon program, a feature that broadcasts people's activities on dozens of outside sites. Yet another privacy backlash leads Facebook to give people more control over Beacon, before the company ultimately scraps it as part of a legal settlement.

❏  March 2008: Facebook hires Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, snatching the savvy, high-profile executive from Google Inc.

❏ April 2008: Facebook introduces Chat.

❏ February 2009: Facebook introduces Like, allowing people to endorse other people's posts.

❏ June 2009: Facebook surpasses News Corp.'s Myspace as the leading online social network in the U.S.

❏ August 2010: Facebook launches location feature, allowing people to share where they are with their friends.

❏ October 2010: The Social Network, a movie about Zuckerberg and the legal battles over Facebook's founding, is released. It receives eight Academy Awards nominations and wins three.

❏ June 2011: Google launches rival social network called Plus. The Winklevoss twins end their legal battle over the idea behind Facebook. They had settled with Facebook for US$65 million in 2008, but later sought more money.

❏ September 2011: Facebook introduces Timeline, a new version of the profile page. It's meant to show highlights from a person's entire life rather than recent posts.

❏ November 2011: Facebook agrees to settle federal charges that it violated users' privacy by getting people to share more information than they agreed to when they signed up to the site. As part of a settlement, Facebook agrees to allow independent auditors to review its privacy practices for two years. It also agrees to get approval from users before changing how the company handles their data.

❏ December 2011: Facebook completes a move to Menlo Park, California. Its address is 1 Hacker Way.

❏ February 2012: Facebook files for an initial public offering of stock. A few weeks later, it unveils new advertising opportunities for brands, allowing ads to mix in with Facebook status updates and photos.

❏ April 2012: Facebook announces plans to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, for US$1 billion in cash and stock. It also discloses it plans to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "FB."

❏ May 2012: Facebook sets a price range of $28 to $35 for its IPO, then increases it to US$34 to US$38. On May 17, Facebook prices its IPO at US$38 per share, and the stock begins trading the next day. The following week, the stock price starts dropping amid concerns about Facebook's ability to keep growing revenue and sell ads on mobile devices.

❏ August 2012: Facebook updates its app for iPhones and iPads to make it less clunky. The US government clears Facebook's Instagram deal.

❏ September 2012: Facebook closes its purchase of Instagram. With Facebook's stock price lower, the deal is now valued at about US$740 million.

❏ October 2012: Facebook says it has 1 billion active users.

❏ December 2012: Facebook rolls out a messaging app called Poke to lukewarm reviews.

❏ January 2013: Facebook unveils a search feature that lets users quickly sift through their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places.

❏ March 2013: Sandberg, the chief operating officer, publishes book urging women to pursue leadership roles.

❏ April 2013: Facebook unveils a new experience for Android phones. The idea behind the new Home service is to bring Facebook's content to the phone's home screen, rather than require users to check apps on the device. It's a flop.

❏ January 2014: Facebook starts to roll out "trending topics," showing users the most popular topics at any given moment.

❏ February 2014: Facebook launches a news app called Paper with plans for more applications outside of its own. It celebrates 10-year anniversary with Zuckerberg declaring he is "even more excited about the next ten years than the last. The first ten years were about bootstrapping this network. Now we have the resources to help people across the world solve even bigger and more important problems."

 - AP