Mammogram by Jo McDougall | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It was on this day in 2004 that 19-year-old student Mark Zuckerburg launched the website Facebook out of his Harvard dorm room. One year earlier, he had been disciplined by the school for creating a site called Facemash, which hacked into online dorm sites and paired ID photos of two Harvard students at a time, asking viewers to rate which of them was more attractive. Facemash didn’t go over well with most of the campus. He had to dismantle the site, but he wasn’t expelled. A year later, he picked up on an idea that a few other students had, to create an online social site, and he ran with it. Facebook was a hit from the beginning.

Facebook began as a social network for Harvard only, and then expanded to other Ivy League schools, then slowly to college campuses across the country. In 2005 it started opening networks in high schools, and by a year later, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address was allowed to join. As of now, there are more than 500 million users worldwide, and the company is valued at more than $43 billion.

Last year Facebook became the subject of a film, The Social Network (2010).

Mammogram by Jo McDougall | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor