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Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook as a sophomore at Harvard University.
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Facebook begins allowing people from other colleges and universities to join.
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Facebook introduces the Wall, which allows people to write personal musings and other tidbits on profile pages. Facebook becomes the target of a lawsuit claiming that Zuckerberg stole the idea for the social network from a company co-founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and a third person at Harvard.
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Facebook expands to include high schools.
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Facebook introduces additional networks, allowing people with corporate email addresses to join.
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Facebook begins letting anyone over 13 join. It also introduces News Feed, which collects friends' Wall posts in one place. Although it leads to complaints about privacy, News Feed would become one of Facebook's most popular features.
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Facebook agrees to sell a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft for $240 million and forges an advertising partnership.
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Facebook unveils its Beacon program, a feature that broadcasts people's activities on dozens of outside sites. Yet another privacy backlash leads Facebook to give people more control over Beacon, before the company ultimately scraps it as part of a legal settlement.
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Facebook launches Platform, a system for letting outside programmers develop tools for sharing photos, taking quizzes and playing games. The system gives rise to a Facebook economy and allows companies such as game maker Zynga Inc. to thrive.
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Facebook hires Sheryl Sandberg as chief operating officer, snatching the savvy, high-profile executive from Google Inc.
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Facebook introduces Chat.
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Facebook introduces Like, allowing people to endorse other people's posts.
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Facebook surpasses News Corp.'s Myspace as the leading online social network in the U.S.
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Facebook launches location feature, allowing people to share where they are with their friends.
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Google launches rival social network called Plus. The Winklevoss twins end their legal battle over the idea behind Facebook. They had settled with Facebook for $65 million in 2008, but later sought more money.
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Facebook introduces Timeline, a new version of the profile page. It's meant to show highlights from a person's entire life rather than recent posts.
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Facebook completes a move to Menlo Park, California.. Its address is 1 Hacker Way.
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Facebook announces plans to buy Instagram, a photo-sharing social network, for $1 billion in cash and stock. It also discloses it plans to list its stock on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "FB."
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Facebook closes its purchase of Instagram. With Facebook's stock price lower, the deal is now valued at about $740 million.
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Facebook unveils a search feature that lets users quickly sift through their social connections for information about people, interests, photos and places.
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Facebook starts to roll out "trending topics," showing users the most popular topics at any given moment.
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Facebook celebrates its 10 year anniversary.