Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com on February 4, 2004, from his dorm room in Harvard's Kirkland House, after about a week of writing the code. It ran on one rented server that cost around $85 a month. He wasn't building for the internet. He was building for one campus, and only the students on it.
Getting in required a Harvard email address, and the system checked for it: your name had to match the address you registered with, then a confirmation email went out with an encrypted link you had to click before the account activated. Zuckerberg had been needling Harvard about this for a while. "Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," he told The Crimson days after launch. "I think it's kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."
The numbers moved fast inside that closed room. Within about five days, more than 650 students had registered, and Zuckerberg expected 900 by the next morning. Within the first month, more than half of Harvard's undergraduates were on the site. Because only Harvard undergrads could sign up, the network felt more intimate, and safer, than the open registration on MySpace or Friendster at the time.
- Launch to one campus only, gated behind that school's own .edu email address.
- Verify identity on signup: name must match the email, then click a confirmation link to activate.
- Let that one campus reach real density before opening a second one.
- Turn on one new school at a time, Stanford, Columbia and Yale came next in March 2004, each gated the same way.
Once Harvard was saturated, the same approach ran again on the next campus, then the next: the rest of the Ivy League and Boston-area schools, then most of the US and Canada, each one starting out as its own closed, verified network before Facebook ever opened to the public.