Today, Facebook is used by more than 1.3 billion people across the globe. But not too long ago, it was just a weird college thing.
In the video above, from April 2004, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appears on CNBC's Bullseye show, where he's asked about "college networking websites" and whether they would be the next big thing. Back then, Facebook was still called "Thefacebook." It was only open to students from a select few colleges. And though social networks like Friendster had been around for a few years, the concept was far from mainstream.
"You can browse around and see whose people's friends are and just check out people's online identities, see how people portray themselves and find out some interesting information about people," Zuckerberg says, not long before the company received its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Clearly, Zuckerberg had high hopes for his new site, which has already reached by 100,000 students. But he plays it coy. "Who knows where we're going next," he says.
As it turns out, Facebook busted out of the college scene, capturing the attention of the entire first world, sparking lawsuits from a bunch of other Harvard students who said the idea was really theirs, changing the very notion of online privacy, going public, making billion and billions of dollars, and making Zuckeberg's appearance on CNBC look rather quaint.
