How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

OPEN REGISTRATION WAS LAUNCHED on September 26, 2006, mere weeks after the News Feed debacle. Prior to open registration, new users were joining at a rate of about 20,000 a day. A few weeks after opening up Facebook to everyone, that number had changed to 50,000 a day, and rising.71 Growth in Facebook’s user numbers began to look like a hockey stick going only steeply upward. Over the next year, Facebook would rocket past 25 million registered users, and around 6 million of those would be older-than-college-age users; 200,000 of those would even be people over age sixty-five.72 If you were a postcollege adult during this period, you might remember this moment. One day, Facebook was just a thing you had heard of. The next day, everyone you knew was on it. Some day after that, your mother and even your grandmother were members.