In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg began handwriting the collection of laws for a new website, known as 'thefacebook'. He said in an portion in The Harvard Crimson that he was inspired to make Facebook from the liable to happen of Facemash: "It is bright that the technology needed to bring into being a centralized Website is easily available ... the benefits are many." On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com. He told The Crimson, "Everyone’s been talking a lot about a unlimited surface volume within Harvard. I think it’s compassionate of inept that it would take the Universal school a two of years to get around to it as I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week." Zuckerberg also regular his design to bring into being a unlimited website that can touch clan around the universal school. According to his roommate, Dustin Moskovitz, "When Mark completed the website; he told a two of friends ... then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland Dwelling online mailing register, which was ... three hundred clan." Moskovitz continued to say that, “By the end of the darkness, we were ... actively attention the registry continued movement. Within twenty-four hours, we had somewhere between dozen hundred and fifteen hundred registrants."

Just six days after the lance of the website, three Harvard Universal school seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing that he would help them erect a civic interlacement called HarvardConnection.com, but instead using their model to erect a competing harvest.

The three complained to the Crimson, and the gazette began a research. Zuckerberg knew about the research so he used TheFacebook.com to discover members in the website who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. He examined a chronicle of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members have ever entered an erroneous watchword into TheFacebook.com. In the cases in which they had failed to login, Mark tried to use them to entry the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts, and he was auspicious in accessing two of them. In the end, three Crimson members filed an action against Zuckerberg and were fixed after. The three later filed an action against Zuckerberg, later planting.

Being a member was initially restricted to students of Harvard Universal School. Within the first month, more than half the undergraduate peopling at Harvard was registered on the labor. Eduardo Saverin (craft aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (vivid skilled workman), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help help the website. In Walk 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This opening continued when it opened to all Ivy Coalition and Boston-realm schools. It progressively reached most universities in Canada and the United States. Facebook was incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the concourse's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved it’s cheap of operations to Palo Counter, California. The concourse dropped ‘The’ from its name after purchasing the authority name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.