Originally called thefacebook.com, Facebook was founded Mark Zuckerberg on Feb.4, 2004 with some financial help from his friend Eduardo Saverin. In the initial stages of development the site was purely for students at Harvard, but Zuckerberg and his companions saw the potential for it to become increasingly widespread, and so made the decision to make it available to other students. These were other US universities at first, with the most recognizable being Yale, but again, the site escaped these boundaries until it became the social utility that anyone can sign-up to in today's world