The name Facebook launched under on 4 February 2004: a directory for Harvard students, then for other universities, that put a face, a course list and a relationship status on one page. It took 1,000 registrations on its first night. The 'The' was dropped in 2005. The record's entry for the two syllables before the trouble.
The gallery records 1,000 registered users on the first night. The record notes that this is the last Facebook statistic that fits comfortably in a sentence.
In 2005 you needed a university email address to get in, and a friend at a university that had it showed me her page as though it were a passport. It was a photograph and a list of courses. It was enough.
The record notes the name came from the printed face books American colleges handed to new students, and that the site's first advantage was simply being the printed thing, searchable, with an edit button.
TheFacebook, 2004–2005. Died of a rename in August 2005 when the company bought facebook.com and stopped saying 'The'. Survived by Facebook, which did everything the gallery says it did, and by the family members it mentions.
You were there. What happened?
