For all the changes Facebook has seen in the past 10 years, it's relatively similar to how CEO Mark Zuckerberg imagined it back in 2004: a discovery site for meeting new people and learning new information.
In a CNBC interview from 2004 (above), a 19- or 20-year-old Zuckerberg — we couldn't confirm the exact date of the interview — spoke with Rebecca Quick on her Bull's Eye show, outlining growth for the new social network and his vision for the future.
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"When we first launched we were hoping for, you know, maybe 400 or 500 people," Zuckerberg said, adding that the company hoped to expand into 100 to 200 universities later that fall. "Now we're at 100,000 people, so who knows where we're going next. [...] Maybe we can make something cool."
The original plan, Zuckerberg said, was to make a bunch of "side applications" that would bring users back. (This tactic ended up working pretty well.) When Quick asked Zuckerberg to describe TheFacebook, as it was originally called, he described a platform remarkably similar to what we still see today.
The emphasis on content discovery has shifted somewhat from people to news, of course, but Zuck's general premise sounds familiar. Despite all the platform's changes, it looks like Facebook hasn't strayed too far from its mission, after all.
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