Facebook Facts and Fiction

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg and a few friends created the site in their college dorm at Harvard, and he eventually dropped out to run the site full-time.

Facebook was originally called "thefacebook" and was open to a network of college students, but in August 2005, the company paid $200,000 to change its domain name to facebook.com.

Early on in the site's history, Facebook was sued by ConnectU, another site based out of Harvard. The Associated Press revealed that Facebook eventually settled with ConnectU for $20 million in cash (cash!) and more than 1.2 million shares of stock.

Initially only U.S. universities -- and subsequently U.S. high schools -- could sign up to use Facebook, but as of September 2006, anyone with a registered e-mail address can become a member.

Microsoft invested $240 million for a piece of Facebook. Doesn't sound like much, does it? That $240 million only accounted for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, placing the value of the company at $15 billion in 2007.

Facebook calls Palo Alto, Calif., home, although it does have an additional office in New York.

Facebook does not make money with membership fees. In fact, anyone can maintain a profile for free, as long as they have an e-mail address. The company makes some revenue with banner ads, which you often see on the margins of the site, but the majority of Facebook's money comes from private investment.

Photo and gift applications are all developed by the Facebook team, but anyone using Facebook's application programming interface (API) can develop other third-party applications, including chess, Scrabble or even zombie games.

According to Facebook, more than 30 million active members access their profile using mobile phones -- with 250 million members worldwide, that's about 12 percent of the whole site. Facebook hasn't developed a telekinesis application…yet.

Aaron Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing," based his screenplay on Ben Mezrich's book "The Accidental Billionaires." J.J. Abrams is too busy with "Lost" and "Star Trek" to worry about social media, and Aaron Spelling passed away in 2006.