Facebook is turning 10 on Tuesday, and it's celebrating its decade online with some new features and some long-earned self-congratulations.
For anybody who's forgotten (or who wasn't a college student back in 2004), the social media behemoth launched on Feb. 4, 2004, from creator Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard University.
"I'm just like a little kid. I get bored easily and computers excite me. Those are the two driving factors here," he explained to his school newspaper just months later.
Profit, he said, was not such a driving factor. "I just like making it and knowing that it works, and having it be wildly successful is cool, I guess, but I mean, I dunno, that's not the goal," he said.
But after its launch, his site — first known as thefacebook.com — soon spread beyond the confines of a coterie of just a few colleges to garner well over a billion active users by the end of last year.
It's also overcome a much-ballyhooed yet troubled IPO, plus the $1 billion buy of photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, not to mention plenty of criticism over Facebook's efforts to protect users' privacy.
It closed out 2013 with strong financial results, too, thanks to a robust new mobile presence, the New York Times reported last week.
So what's next? On Tuesday, the site is set to unveil a new feature called "A Look Back" that will let users make personal slideshows or movies showing favorite moments from their lives since they first joined Facebook.
In the longer term, Zuckerberg has bigger plans for his brainchild. He told Bloomberg BusinessWeek last week he wants the site to become more intuitive and to get better at helping its users, and he is set to appear on the "Today" show on NBC on Tuesday to mark his site's 10th birthday.