Last December Facebook changed its name: Meta. Although the company really does it and not the social network, and for the time being it will continue to be called as it has been until now, Mark Zuckerberg’s has opted for a new format to get away from all the controversies that surrounded it long ago, and from which it was taking a tonic that endangered the network as such. Now, where does the name of Facebook come from that the programmer and businessman gave it in 2004?
Facebook, beyond a play on words
Facebook Inc., the company that owns the most used social network in the world, changed its name for all purposes. The company’s boss and owner, Mark Zuckerberg, made the announcement during the Facebook Connect 2021 virtual event, and for which the company is now called ‘Meta’, which is Greek for ‘beyond’, and for the who wants to take social networks to a new level focused on the virtual world.
However, and as something to keep in mind, this change does not affect the social networks that belong to the parent company. Therefore, both Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook will continue to be called and work the same as before. In fact, the modification will not have any type of effect for the users of said platforms.
Now, all this has led us to ask ourselves a question: where does the name of Facebook come from and why is it called that? What made Mark Zuckerberg choose this pun 18 years ago now?
Initially Facebook was Facesmash
But this is something that did not happen overnight. It’s more; If we take into account its creation, we can say that, initially, Facebook as such was not the first name of the company or of the social network that would take its name. We see it at the end of 2003, when Zuckerberg comes up with the idea of creating a website to entertain his Harvard classmates .
What neither he nor anyone else knew is that, almost 20 years later, that created website was going to accommodate the more than 200 million users that inhabit this network. And so, at that time, this platform that we know today had taken the name of Facemash.
It was the domain where the American programmer and businessman decided to make a prank in which he allowed students to compare and judge the attractiveness of other students and make rankings. Two days later the site was closed for using photos without permission.
Facemash was the germ that gave rise to Facebook and received more than 450 visits and 22,000 page views in the first afternoon, being responsible for bringing down the Harvard University server where Zuckerberg was.
A resounding success to reach 2,000 million users
This success led Zuckerberg to create a new social network with his peers without knowing, above all, what was coming at them, and not exactly in a negative way. The platform was then called ‘The Facebook’ and was only available to people with a Harvard email address .
It consisted of a profile where users could connect with other people, share interests and include personal information such as their class schedules and clubs they belonged to. Later, and once it was released on the world wide web beyond what the university itself was, the name was changed to be just ‘Facebook’, as it has been until now.
As its name indicates, and it is not difficult to guess, it is made up of two English words: ‘face’, which comes from the Latin ‘facies’ which means ‘face’, in addition to the expression ‘book’ which means ‘ book’, translating into Spanish in a strange ‘caralibro’. Facebook was gaining more followers as time went by. However, its great ‘boom’ did not come until it was translated into different languages.
Spanish, French and German were the first to join the social network around 2007, until its new inauguration in 2010, becoming a great success as time went by: while at the end of In 2005, the network already had around 6 million active monthly users, five years later there were more than 132 million unique monthly users, already with its iconic ‘like’ button as an identifying seal. Currently, its value stands at 572,000 million dollars.
