Facebook barrels ahead on 10th birthday

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.