Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
 
 
 On Feb. 4, 2004, in his Harvard dorm room, Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com, a website where college students could post information about themselves, trade messages, and become virtual “friends” with one another. It was entering an already-crowded field of social networks. Friendster was the world’s most popular at the time, but it was about to be overtaken by a one-year-old upstart called MySpace. Google had launched Orkut just weeks earlier. 
 
 Will Oremus Will Oremus is Slate’s senior technology writer. Email him at will.oremus@slate.com or follow him on Twitter. 
 
 Facebook was different because it was only for college students, featured a clean layout devoid of spam, and had no immediate plans to make money. It was an instant hit. “I assume I’ll eventually make something profitable,” Zuckerberg shrugged in a June 2004 interview with the Harvard student newspaper. (It took him a while, but Facebook turned its first profit in 2009, and last year it reported a profit of some $1.5 billion on nearly $8 billion in revenues.) 
 
 By December the site had 1 million users, and it hadn’t even added its photo-upload feature yet. Here’s what thefacebook.com looked like in 2005, a year after it launched: 
 
 Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
 Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
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 Over the years it piled on the features. Some, like News Feed and the like button, changed the Internet forever. Others, like Facebook Gifts, not so much. For its 10th birthday, Facebook has put together a timeline of significant events in its own history. It reflects a bit of a selective memory—you won’t find Gifts, Beacon, or the site’s short-lived experiment with democracy on this timeline. But then, that’s part of what made Facebook so appealing in the first place: the ability to edit your own image to your liking. 
 
 Image courtesy of Facebook 
 
 The timeline is one of several features that Facebook released Monday night, on the eve of its anniversary. On Tuedsay it will unveil a product called “A Look Back” that lets users make a personal movie or slideshow of their favorite moments in their lives since they joined Facebook. The company also launched a slick new iPhone app, Paper, in the App Store on Monday. 
 
 
 
 Here’s Zuckerberg’s statement on the eve of his brainchild’s 10th birthday: 
 
 It's been an incredible journey so far, and I'm so grateful to be a part of it. It's been amazing to see how people have used Facebook to build a real community and help each other in so many ways. In the next decade, we have the opportunity and responsibility to connect everyone and to keep serving the community as best we can. 
 
 Advertisement ||||| As Mark Zuckerberg reflects upon Facebook's first 10 years today, he's encouraging the community he built to do the same. Starting this morning, hundreds of millions of Facebook users will receive a notification that a video summary of their life so far on Facebook is ready to watch. Each user's "Look Back" compilation contains 15 or so of their most-liked photos, statuses, and life events set to a catchy tune. The videos are a bit cheesy, but are potent reminders that for many of us, Facebook has become a very normal way to document our daily lives. 
 
 A small team at Facebook spent the last few months crafting the videos and ensuring that the company had the necessary resources to render hundreds of millions of HD videos and send them out to users. Facebook has issued Year In Review compilations before, after all, but never in video form. Two groups within Facebook played a particularly important role: Everstore, the team in charge of media storage, and Moonshot, the team tasked with allocating idle server power to doing some heavy lifting whenever possible. 
 
 The social network is still 'A Mark Zuckerberg Production' 
 
 Facebook's engineering lead on the project, Nick Kwiatek, calls Look Back one of the company's largest video projects of all time. "One of the things that motivated us was that there's really only a handful of companies that could take on something like this — that could render videos for as many people as we can," he says. After spending several weeks optimizing the company's servers for the unusual task, his team effectively cut down the time required to render one video from 17 minutes to just one. The final result might look more like a Bar Mitzvah video than an epic montage of your life, but for most people, it will be worth watching. And if you look hard, you'll find Mark Zuckerberg's signature below each video. A lot has changed in 10 years, but perhaps one thing hasn't: the social network is still "A Mark Zuckerberg Production." ||||| You know what's cooler than a million users? A billion users. And now Facebook has just that. 
 
 Yep, the social network birthed in a Harvard dorm grew in eight short years to a membership that it says accounts for nearly one-seventh of the world’s population. Not fake users or bots — which Facebook tracks closely — but real humans who actively engage on the social network, a company spokesperson told TODAY. 
 
 Just so we’re clear: As of Sept. 14, one in seven people on this planet has been classified by the company as an active Facebook user. 
 
 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared the milestone in an exclusive interview with Matt Lauer, which aired Thursday on TODAY. 
 
 "I mean, it's just — an amazing honor," Zuckerberg said of his social network’s monolithic membership when he sat down with Lauer last week at Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, Calif. "To be able to come into work every day and build things that help a billion people stay connected with the people they care about every month — that's just unbelievable." 
 
 No hyperbole there. Since Facebook launched, the social network’s seen 1.13 trillion "likes" and 140.4 billion friend connections. 219 billion photos are currently being shared, while 17 billion check-ins have been made. Since the music listening app launched in September 2011, 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times — that's around 210,000 years of music. 
 
 And while Zuckerberg may have a responsibility to investors to publicly boast Facebook’s accomplishments, this gives us an opportunity to wrap our heads around exactly what 1 billion means. 
 
 How big? 
 
 If Facebook were a country, it would have the third largest population, right behind China (1,347,350,000) and India (1,210,200,000), and ahead of the United States (314,500,000). 
 
 If steampunk Facebook existed in 1804 — precisely when the world population hit 1 billion — everyone on Earth would have a profile: Thomas Jefferson, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Jane Austen ... and every other living soul. 
 
 Rock Center: Zuckerberg defends Facebook as it reaches 1 billion users 
 
 What may be more staggering than the "1 billion users" milestone is how quickly Facebook reached it. 
 
 "I don’t think in the history of the world that there's been a single medium that's amassed a billion users as fast as Facebook did," Steve Rubel told TODAY.com. As vice president of all-encompassing public relations firm Edelman, Rubel is a well-regarded expert in the many ways we consume information, and what that means on a large scale. 
 
 Radio, television, even mobile phones — Rubel notes none of these were adopted at the rapid global rate comparable to Facebook’s eight-year rise. "Considering I struggle to think of anything that touches as many people as much as Facebook does," he said. "Maybe water ..." 
 
 True enough, if you're not on Facebook now, you are — quite literally — not participating in the global conversation, which is taking place on Facebook. It's your friends, your family, your employers, your interests and that's just in the United States. Everywhere, as we continually see, Facebook aids all sides of revolution. 
 
 As Zuckerberg told Lauer, "There's no way that when we were getting started with (Facebook) that I would have ever thought that, you know, myself or any of the people around me would be able to — to be a part of something like this." 
 
 The average Facebook user worldwide — now around age 22 — would've been about 14 when Zuckerberg famously launched the first version of Facebook in 2004. As the Aaron Sorkin-penned movie "The Social Network" depicts, thefacebook.com was first available only to Harvard students, before rolling out to other Ivy League schools in the U.S. and Canada. 
 
 Whether cunningly planned or by accident, exclusivity was a successful strategy. By opening first to upwardly mobile students, the word spread organically. Early Facebook offered a clean, well-ordered alternative to the glitter GIFs and chaos of MySpace, the the social media leader of the time. People wanted in. 
 
 So in 2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school students in the U.S. and six other countries, including Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia. And, in a politically savvy move, a few choice employees at high-tech companies including Apple and Microsoft were also invited to join. 
 
 Matt Harnack / Facebook Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks to TODAY's Matt Lauer. 
 
 Then, in 2006, your mom was allowed to join — along with everybody else age 13 and older. Things quickly got interesting. 
 
 Story: Mark Zuckerberg confirms: 'I wear the same thing every day' 
 
 Going global 
 
 By December 2006, Facebook had reached 12 million users. (An earlier version of this story citing statistics provided by Facebook reported that by January 2006, Facebook reached 25 million users.) At that time, Australia, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States as the top five countries signing up for the social network. The average Facebook user was 19 years old, and had 598 Facebook friends. 
 
 In a reverse British invasion, Facebook saturated the U.K. in four years, stomping both MySpace and Bebo. By 2010, Facebook accounted for more than 50 percent of the U.K.'s Web traffic, according to Hitwise. (Neither Bebo nor MySpace accounted for even 2 percent.) While membership in the U.K. has since leveled of at 32 million members, it is the sixth highest amount of Facebook users, according to Socialbakers, a social media analytic firm. 
 
 The first countries to adopt the social network have leveled off — the U.S. itself started to slow down at 150 million in 2011. Pretty much everyone who’s going to join has joined, because "younger people can’t use it and some older people never will," noted Jan Rezab, Socialbakers CEO. 
 
 Outside the United States however, "growth is huge," said Rezab. Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico join the U.S. as the top five countries currently engaging with Facebook. Further, Rezab noted, Facebook has handily overtaken the native social networks in other countries. The only notable exceptions are China, where Facebook is not allowed, and Russia, where VKontakte has 290 million users, over Facebook’s 6.7 million. 
 
 Russia is also the largest Internet market in Europe, so it's no mystery why Zuckerberg would have visited the country earlier this week. While there, he met with Russian prime minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, a vocal fan of technology. 
 
 But the next great territory for Facebook might lie elsewhere. In fact, the next billion Facebook users may rely on mobile technology. "There’s a lot of potential in Africa," Rezab said, especially since it's a region where many don’t have computers but they do have phones. Mobile phones are largely credited with Facebook’s explosion — there are more than 600 million mobile Facebook users, and that number is growing at a rapid rate. 
 
 Pew Research Center 
 
 Facebook triggered a global hunger for social networking. The Pew Research Center mapped it out in February, and the findings were astounding. In addition to the expected high levels of engagement from the U.S., Britain, Spain and Germany, there were even some countries — Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt — where having Internet access almost automatically means social network membership. 
 
 Growing pains 
 
 With extreme growth comes extreme headaches — for both Facebook and its users. Civilian users wrapped their heads around a new social ettiquette, uploading our real world quirks to online and expecting Facebook to referee. And to both earn money and serve a growing and diverse demographic, the once streamlined social network which users flocked to for a sense of privacy not afforded on MySpace has changed. A lot. 
 
 In its march toward global acceptance, Facebook pummeled Flickr to become the biggest photo-sharing outlet on the Internet. The now-ubiquitous "like" button lives all over the Internet. Timeline and Open Graph allow users to advertise not just what they "like," but what they're reading, watching and listening, too. 
 
 With all this action, it's no wonder Facebook is now the focal point of our Internet privacy fears. Earlier this year, Facebook finally reached a settlement with the FTC stemming from it's privacy rollbacks in 2009. That's when Facebook made much of your previously private "personal information" widely available to the public and third-party advertisers. 
 
 According to the FTC complaint, Facebook "deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public." The FTC settlement didn't make Facebook roll anything back — you must actively "opt out" to lock down what privacy remains. Going forward, however, the settlement requires Facebook, in part, to give "consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining their express consent before sharing their information beyond their privacy settings." 
 
 Throughout, Zuckerberg and Facebook have maintained dedication to their product. 
 
 "Our responsibility as a company is just to do the best that we can and build the best products for people," Zuckerberg told Lauer, echoing assertions he's made over the years when consumer advocates called out the site over user privacy and users griped about every service addition and site redesign. "And if we build the best products," he told Lauer, "then I think that we can continue leading in this space for a long time." 
 
 Industry watchers such as Edelman's Rubel say it would take a real game changer to usurp Facebook from its social media dominance — a zombie apocalypse perhaps, or Google Glass, the search giant's high-concept glasses that promise to make social media integration wearable, and thus, more mobile than the mobile phone. 
 
 As we await that possible Google Glass future, Facebook is already locking it down with purchases such as mobile photo sharing network Instagram, cementing its hold on the increasingly popular photo sharing aspect of social media. The tiny, powerful computers in our pockets are the next frontier for social media, and as Zuckerberg told Lauer, Facebook is on it. 
 
 "The future is really gonna be about mobile, right? And the opportunities for growth there," Zuckerberg explained to Lauer. 
 
 When queried by Lauer about whether Facebook is still playing catch-up in the mobile area, Zuckerberg quickly pointed out, "Well, we do have the most used mobile apps. There's five billion people in the world who have phones. So we should be able to serve many more people — and — and grow the user base there." That confidence may border on bluster, but if anybody can do it, Facebook can. 
 
 Watch Matt Lauer's interview with Zuckerberg on Oct. 4 on Rock Center with Brian Williams. 
 
 Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Join her, won't you, on Twitter and/or Facebook. Also, Google+. 
 
 More about Facebook:
– In Internet terms, Facebook is already ancient. Today, the social network marks its 10th anniversary, and it's inviting hundreds of millions of users to share in the fun via "Look Back" videos. The project, overseen by multiple teams within the company, shows about 15 of your "most-liked" posts over music, the Verge reports. They began appearing this morning. "One of the things that motivated us was that there's really only a handful of companies that could take on something like this—that could render videos for as many people as we can," says the project's head. Mark Zuckerberg also offers a note to users: "It's rare to be able to touch so many people's lives, and I try to remind myself to make the most of every day and have the biggest impact I can," he writes. "It's been amazing to see how all of you have used our tools to build a real community." He also addresses the future: "Today, social networks are mostly about sharing moments. In the next decade, they'll also help you answer questions and solve complex problems." Feeling nostalgic? Here's the Harvard Crimson's 2004 report on the "hundreds" joining thefacebook.com, or Slate has its own "look back."