Timeline of Facebook

"Facebook timeline" redirects here. For the Facebook feature unveiled in late 2011, see Facebook features § Timeline.

See also: History of Facebook

This is a timeline of Facebook.

Major trends

Userbase

Time period	Key developments at Facebook
January 2004–September 2006	Facebook gradually enlarges the set of people who are allowed to register, starting from Harvard University only in January 2004, then gradually expanding to more US universities, then moving to international student networks, and finally switching to open registration in September 2006: anybody who is at least 13 and has a valid email address can sign up.
September 2006 onward	Even as Facebook's userbase keeps increasing, the eligibility requirements for Facebook remain largely the same. At some point, Facebook starts allowing people to register with either an email address or a mobile phone, thereby making it possible for people who do not have email addresses to register.

Product and accessibility

Time period	Key developments at Facebook
2005 onward, but largely concentrated September 2006–September 2009	Facebook develops some of the core social infrastructure that would come to define the user experience for many years to come, starting with photos and the ability to tag friends in them (October and December 2005), Facebook's News Feed (September 2006), and then proceeding to Facebook Platform in May 2007, an attempt to get developers to create applications for use within Facebook. The ability to @-tag friends in posts and comments is introduced in September 2009.
Concentrated 2009–2011	Facebook works on becoming the "social layer" of the web, with the (now deprecated) name Facebook Connect, that allows Facebook's like buttons to be displayed on external websites, and also allows them to use Facebook for logins.
Concentrated 2012 onward, with some early moves in 2010 and 2011	Facebook shifts attention to mobile phones. At the low end of the market, this includes initiatives such as Facebook Zero and Facebook for SIM. At the high end, this includes development and improvement of iOS and Android apps, as well as initiatives such as Facebook Home and Facebook Paper (the latter, in January 2014, is the first product of Facebook Creative Labs, Facebook's in-house initiative for small teams to work on standalone mobile apps). Facebook also acquires a number of mobile-focused companies, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and fails to acquire Snapchat. The company's vision evolves to being a family of interconnected apps rather than a single standalone product, and this vision is explicitly articulated at the 2015 F8 conference.
Late 2011 onward	Facebook reimagines some of its core infrastructure, replacing the profile and wall with the new Timeline, and replacing search with Facebook Graph Search. A plan to significantly redesign the News Feed, announced March 2013, is abandoned a few months later.
2013 onward	Facebook moves more aggressively into Twitter territory: it launches support for hashtags and hashtag-based search, and also introduces trending topics.
2014 onward, picking up steam in 2015 and 2016	Facebook starts making a new set of changes to its news feed, driven by the Feed Quality Program. More so than previous sets of changes, new changes are based on extensive efforts to gather feedback, including in-person feedback from focus groups and more large-scale surveys. The changes include more explicit identification of hoaxes and the greater use of signals such as time spent viewing a piece of content in the feed and time spent reading the article off Facebook. Machine learning and AI techniques are also used increasingly in the service of improving feed quality.
2015 onward, with major rollout in early 2016	Facebook expands aggressively into live-streaming with the launch of Facebook Live.

Full timeline

Year	Month and date (if available)	Event type	Event
2003	October 28	Prelude	Mark Zuckerberg releases Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook. It is described as a Harvard University version of Hot or Not.
2004	January	Creation	Mark Zuckerberg begins with his fellow co-founders writing Facebook.
2004	January 11	Creation	Zuckerberg registers thefacebook.com domain.
2004	February 4	Creation	Zuckerberg launches Facebook as a Harvard-only social network.
2004	March	Userbase	Facebook expands to MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and Yale University.
2004	April 13	Financial/legal	Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin form Thefacebook.com LLC, a partnership
2004	June	Funding	Facebook receives its first investment from Peter Thiel for US$500,000.
2004	June	Financial/legal	Facebook incorporates into a new company, and Sean Parker (early employee of Napster) becomes its president.
2004	June	Physical location	Facebook moves its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.
2004	August	Product	To compete with growing campus-only service i2hub, Zuckerberg launches Wirehog. It is a precursor to Facebook Platform applications.
2004	September	Financial/legal	ConnectU files a lawsuit against Zuckerberg and other Facebook founders.
2004	December 30	Userbase	Facebook achieves its one millionth registered user.
2005	Early year	Userbase	Facebook adds international school networks
2005	May 26	Funding	Accel Partners invests $13 million into Facebook.
2005	July 19	Acquisition talks	News Corp acquires MySpace, spurring rumors about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company.
2005	August 23	Product	Facebook acquires Facebook.com domain for $200,000.
2005	September	Product	Facebook launches a high school version of the website.
2005	October	Product	Facebook launches its photos feature with no restrictions on storage (but without the ability to tag friends).
2005	December	Product	Facebook introduces the ability to tag friends in photos.
2006	unknown	Financial/legal	A leaked cash flow statement shows that Facebook had a net gain of $5.66 million for the 2005 fiscal year.
2006	March 28	Acquisition talks	A potential acquisition of Facebook is reportedly under negotiations, for $750 million first, then later $2 billion.
2006	August 22	Product	Facebook launches a blogging feature known as "Facebook Notes".
2006	September 5	Product	Facebook launches News Feed. The original news feed is an algorithmically generated and constantly refreshing summary of updates about the activities of one's friends. The concept is relatively new at the time, with Twitter having launched only a few months in advance.
2006	September	Acquisition talks	Facebook discusses with Yahoo! about the latter possibly acquiring the former, for $1 billion.
2006	September 26	Userbase	Facebook is open to everyone aged 13 and over, and with a valid email address.
2007	January 10	Product	Facebook launches m.facebook.com and officially announces mobile support.
2007	May 24	Product	Facebook announces Facebook Platform for developers to build applications on top of Facebook's social graph.
2007	October 24	Funding	Microsoft announces that it will purchase a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.
2007	November 6	Product	Facebook launches Facebook Beacon with 44 partner sites at the time of launch. Beacon is part of Facebook's advertisement system that sent data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. Certain activities on partner sites were published to a user's News Feed. On the Same day, Facebook launches Facebook Pages.
2007	November 19	Product	Facebook removes "is" from status updates, allowing users to adopt a more free-form version of status updates.
2008	May	Team	Adam D'Angelo, an early employee and chief technology officer, leaves Facebook.
2008	June	Financial/legal	Facebook settles both lawsuits, ConnectU vs Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg et al. and intellectual property theft, Wayne Chang et al. over The Winklevoss Chang Group's Social Butterfly project. The settlement effectively had Facebook acquiring ConnectU for $20 million in cash and over $1.2 million in shares, valued at $45 million based on $15 billion company valuation.
2008	June 25	Product	Facebook allows users to comment on items in their friends' mini-feeds.
2008	July 21	Product	Facebook launches a complete site redesign with options for tabbed redesign, and allows users to opt into it. By September 2008, it forces all users to opt-in.
2008	August	Financial/legal	Employees reportedly privately sell their shares to venture capital firms, at a company valuation of between $3.75 billion to $5 billion.
2008	October	Physical location	Facebook sets up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
2008	November	Product	Facebook launches Facebook Credits in order to help users purchase Facebook gifts.
2009	February 9	Product	Facebook activates the Facebook like button.
2009	August	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook acquires FriendFeed.
2009	September	Financial/legal	Facebook claims that it has turned cash flow positive for the first time.
2009	September 10	Product	Facebook announces a feature whereby people can @-tag friends in their status updates and comments.
2009	September	Product	Facebook shuts down Beacon.
2010	February	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook acquires Malaysian contact-importing startup Octazen Solutions.
2010	April 2	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook announces the acquisition of photo-sharing service called Divvy-shot for an undisclosed amount.
2010	April 19	Product	Facebook introduces Community Pages, which are Pages that are populated with articles from Wikipedia.
2010	April 21	Product	Facebook introduces Instant Personalization, starting with Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora. It also starts allowing external websites to embed the like button.
2010	May 18	Accessibility	Facebook launches Facebook Zero, allowing for free access to a text-only version of Facebook's mobile website with some carriers.
2010	June	Financial/legal	Facebook employees sell shares of the company on SecondMarket at a company valuation of $11.5 billion. Facebook also announces the start of the Like button being available for comments.
2010	October 1	Popular culture	The Social Network, a film about the beginnings of Facebook directed by David Fincher is released. The film is met with widespread critical acclaim as well as commercial success; however, Mark Zuckerberg says that the film is a largely inaccurate account of what happened.
2010	December	Product	Facebook launches a redesign that emphasizes the most important parts of someone's life, including one's biographic information, photos, education, work experience, and important relationships. It replaces the tabs at the top of each profile page with links on the left side of the page.
2011	January	Funding	$500 million is invested into Facebook for 1% of the company, placing its worth at $50 billion.
2011	February	Political activism	Facebook adds new "civil union" option for gay partnerships.
2011	February	Product	Facebook application and content aggregator Pixable estimates that Facebook will host 100 billion photos by summer 2011.
2011	June 28	Competition	Google launches Google+, widely perceived as a competitor to Facebook. Commentators believe that Facebook's subsequent rapid release of new features and improvements may have in part been hastened due to competition from Google+.
2011	July 6	Product	Facebook partners with Skype to add video chat and updates its website interface to make messaging more seamless.
2011	August 9, then October 19	Product	Facebook Messenger is launched for Android and IOS. October 19, 2011 update makes the app available to Blackberry os.
2011	September, then November 30	Product	Facebook increases the character limit for status update posts from 500 to 5,000 in September and to 63,206 on November 30.
2011	September 14	Product	Facebook allows people to subscribe to non-friends and to set the extent to which they receive updates from their existing friends and people they are subscribing to.
2011	September 15	Product	Facebook partners with Heroku for Facebook application development using the Facebook Platform.
2011	September 22	Product	Facebook launches new UI Timeline in F8 Convention.
2011	October 6	Accessibility	Facebook for SIM, a client/server SIM application developed by international digital security company Gemalto that enables people to access Facebook using the SMS protocol on their mobile phones, without needing a data plan, is released in partnership with select carriers.
2011	October 10	Accessibility	Facebook launches iPad app.
2011	December 21	Product	Facebook login page changes due to Facebook Timeline addition.
2012	January 10	Product	Facebook starts showing advertisements (called Featured Posts) in the news feed. The advertisements are generally for pages that one's Facebook friends have engaged with.
2012	April	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook acquires Instagram for $1 billion.
2012	May	Financial/legal	Facebook IPO: Facebook goes public, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
2012	October	Userbase	Facebook reaches 1 billion active users.
2013	January 15	Product	Facebook announces and begins rolling out Facebook Graph Search.
2013	January 30, then April 9	Product	Facebook rolls out detailed and fine-grained emoticons to express different actions and emotional states in one's status updates (experimental launch January 30, official launch with universal availability April 9).
2013	March 7	Product	Facebook announces major planned changes to the News Feed. However, it is later revealed that Facebook abandoned these changes after getting negative feedback from users.
2013	March 8	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook announces that they acquired the team from Storylane, but not the product itself.
2013	April 4, then April 12	Product (mobile-only)	Facebook launches Facebook Home, a user interface layer for Android-compatible phones that provides a replacement home screen that makes it easier for users to browse and post.
2013	April 15	Product	Facebook launches a new timeline.
2013	April–July	Product	Facebook launches Stickers, initially only for its iOS apps in April, but later expanding to its web version in July.
2013	June 12, then June 27	Product	Facebook announces support for hashtags, initially only for the web (June 12). Later (June 27), more functionality is added and hashtags are extended to the mobile site and apps.
2013	June 30	Political activism	Zuckerberg joins 700 Facebook employees for the June 2013 Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration march in San Francisco, U.S. The 2013 Pride celebration was especially significant, as it followed a Supreme Court of the United States ruling that deemed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional.
2013	August 20	Userbase/accessibility	Facebook launches Internet.org in collaboration with six cellphone companies (Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, and Qualcomm). Internet.org aims to bring affordable Internet access to everybody by increasing affordability, increasing efficiency, and facilitating the development of new business models around the provision of Internet access.
2013	September 26	Product	Facebook begins letting people edit their posts and comments after publishing.
2013	September 29	Product	Facebook announces that it will begin rolling out Graph Search for posts and comments.
2013	November 13	Acquisition talks	A number of news outlets reports that Facebook offered to buy Snapchat for $3 billion USD but was spurned.
2013	December 18	Financial/legal	Facebook, Zuckerberg, & banks face IPO lawsuit.
2014	January 13	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook acquires Branch Media, and it is announced that the team working on the startup will join Facebook to work on conversations products for Facebook that builds on similar ideas as Branch Media's products, while Branch Media's existing products will continue to operate separately. Facebook confirms that the acquisition is a talent acquisition.
2014	January 16	Product	Facebook launches Trending Topics for its web version in the US, UK, Canada, India, and Australia. This is based on feedback to a pilot version tested both on the web and mobile starting August 2013.
2014	January 30, then February 3	Product (mobile-only)	On January 30, Facebook announces Facebook Paper, a separate iOS app that provides a newspaper-like or magazine-like experience for reading on the phone, scheduled for launch on February 3. Facebook also announces Facebook Creative Labs, an intra-company effort to have separate teams working on separate mobile apps that specialize in different facets related to the Facebook experience, rather than trying to make changes to Facebook's main web version, mobile version, or its iOS and Android apps, and says that Facebook Paper is the first product of Facebook Creative Labs. Facebook Paper receives mixed reviews, and some commentators note its similarity with Flipboard.
2014	February 4	Milestone	Facebook marks the ten-year anniversary of its launch (February 4, 2004), and Mark Zuckerberg writes a public post about why he is proud of Facebook so far. The Pew Research Center releases a report about increasing Facebook usage by adults to mark the occasion. Many other commentators write articles about Facebook to honor the occasion.
2014	February 4–7	Product	On February 4, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, Facebook introduces its Look Back feature that creates an automated video for each person looking back on the person's life as recorded on Facebook. On February 7, Facebook adds the ability to edit the Look Back videos.
2014	February 13	Political activism	Facebook opens up many new LGBTQ-friendly gender identity and pronoun options.
2014	February 19	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook announces that it is acquiring the Sequoia Capital-backed multi-platform mobile messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion USD ($4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares) plus an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing. . According to the announcement, WhatsApp will continue to operate independently, Facebook will continue developing Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum will join the Facebook Board of Directors. On February 24, in a keynote address to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Zuckerberg says that the WhatsApp acquisition is part of the Internet.org vision.
2014	March 3	Acquisitions by Facebook	Rumors are circulated that Facebook is buying drone maker Titan Aerospace for $60 million. It is believed that the acquisition will help bolster Facebook's vision with Internet.org. Later, on April 14, 2014, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is acquiring Titan Aerospace.
2014	March 6	Product	Facebook announces that it will begin rollout of a somewhat modified news feed. The changes are along the same lines as those announced in the planned revamp announced March 7, 2013 (that was halted), but are more minor and focused.
2014	March 17	Product	Facebook's face recognition algorithm (DeepFace) reaches near-human accuracy in identifying faces.
2014	March 25	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook announces that it is acquiring Oculus VR, Inc., a leading virtual reality company. The amount is reported to be $2 billion in cash and stock.
2014	March 27	Accessibility	Facebook announces a Connectivity Lab as part of the Internet.org initiative, with the goal of bringing the Internet to everybody via drones, using acqhires from Ascenta.
2014	April 24	Product	Facebook announces FB Newswire to help journalists find news on its website.
2014	April 30	Product, accessibility	Facebook launches anonymous login so that people can use apps without giving them their data.
2014	June 18	Product (mobile-only)	Facebook releases Facebook Slingshot, an instant messaging software application for sharing photos and videos with friends, for Android and iOS devices.
2014	July 21	Product	Facebook launches Save, a read-it-later feature that allows users to save links, places, and media pages for later perusal.
2014	September 15 onward	Userbase/controversy	Facebook cracks down on the Facebook profiles of drag queens in San Francisco, asking them to switch to using their real names, and shutting down the accounts of those who refuse to comply. There is considerable pushback, including a planned protest at Facebook headquarters, that is delayed for a meeting with Facebook, but Facebook refuses to budge on its policy. Many people, particularly those in or sympathetic to the LGBTQ community, sign up for competing social network Ello, that does not enforce a real names policy, promises to remain "ad-free and porn-friendly", and aims to have a zero-tolerance policy for hate speech. On October 1, Facebook announced a clarification to its real name policy and said that drag queens could continue operating their accounts. The company clarified that people should use their authentic real-world names but need not use their legal names.
2014	October 6	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook officially completes the acquisition of WhatsApp, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum agrees to match Mark Zuckerberg's $1 salary.
2014	October 23	Product	Facebook launches pseudonymous app Rooms, where Facebook users can create and participate in forums on any topic and do not need to use their real names. The forthcoming launch of the pap had been reported on October 7.
2014	October 31	Accessibility	Facebook creates a custom Tor link, making it easier for people to access Facebook anonymously in locations where it is censored.
2014	November 7	Product	Facebook makes it easy for people to unfollow friends and pages they've liked, both while viewing pages in the feed and while reviewing summaries of the most prolific contributors to their feed.
2014	December 8	Product	Facebook rolls out keyword search for all posts, part of Facebook Graph Search, to all US English users on desktop and using iPhones. It is cited as a potential competitor to Yelp and other product recommendation engines and also as a potential way to surface old, embarrassing posts by people.
2014	December 11	Outreach	Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds his second Q&A, open to the public, about Facebook, where he discusses the dislike button and Facebook's role in promoting viewpoint diversity, helping people share more, and facilitating social and political transparency.
2015	January 5	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook acquires Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces.
2015	January 8	Acquisitions by Facebook	Facebook acquires QuickFire Networks, a company that built a custom hardware and software platform for reducing video file sizes and upload times. The Wall Street Journal got the news on January 8, with confirmation later arriving on QuickFire’s site.
2015	January 16	Open sourcing	Facebook open sources the Torch library, containing some of its deep learning tools in machine learning, including new code that runs 23 times as fast for training convolutional neural networks as the fastest publicly available code until that time.
2015	January 20	Product	Facebook announces that it will show fewer hoaxes in the news feed, and mark items it identifies as potential hoaxes so that readers can view them more critically.
2015	March 17	Product	Facebook introduces a free friend-to-friend payment service within its Messenger app. This is touted by some tech journalists as potential competition for PayPal's Venmo service.
2015	March 25	Product	At the first day of the 2015 F8 conference (a conference for Facebook to make announcements about major product and service changes), the company makes a bunch of announcements, with the unifying theme being that the company wants to be an integrated bunch of apps, each fulfilling a somewhat different role. Currently, the company's leading apps include its main app, Messenger, and externally built and acquired apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp. Specific announcements include making Facebook Messenger more of a platform, a new real-time comments system, embeddable videos, spherical video, Parse for the Internet of Things, updates to ad exchange LiveRail, and analytics for apps.
2015	March 26	Open sourcing	Facebook releases its React native framework for building native apps as open source. This is announced on the second day of the F8 conference.
2015	March 31	Userbase, product	Facebook launches a feature called Scrapbook that allows parents to give their kids an official presence on Facebook even when they are too young to have their own accounts on the network by tagging them in photos. A Scrapbook can be owned by two people who have indicated to Facebook that they are in a relationship. When the kids grow old enough and get their own accounts, they can take over ownership of the Scrapbook and change the privacy settings thereof.
2015	April 22	Product	Facebook launches an Android app called Hello to instantly matches phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls to Facebook profiles to show information about the caller/callee, block calls from commonly blocked numbers, and search for businesses to call, with initial rollout in the United States, Brazil, and Nigeria. There is no corresponding iOS app, because iOS does not allow apps to interact with phone calls. Commentators compare Facebook Hello to the native Android dialer app and to TrueCaller, an app with crowdsourced data.
2015	April 28 (announcement), April 30 (closure)	Product, platform	Facebook announces that it is shutting down its friends data API, forcing developers to migrate to the Graph API. The company is also allowing for more granular control of data that users may share with apps.
2015	May 12	Product	Facebook launches "Instant Articles" for Publishers. Publishers who use Instant Articles can opt in to have some of their articles shown to mobile users inside Facebook's app itself, without users having to leave the app and visit the customer's website. Initial launch partners include BuzzFeed, the New York Times, National Geographic and six others. The article as displayed on Facebook mimics the article on the website in terms of layout, and Instant Articles allows for correct attribution and analytics with tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture, and Comscore, in addition to publishers benefiting from Facebook's own analytics. Publishers can choose to have only a subset of their content available as Instant Articles, and Facebook handles the porting of the article to the Instant Article format itself. BuzzFeed praised Facebook for complying with its requests for compatibility with analytics tracking, and said the process was very collaborative throughout. Load times are claimed to be ten times faster than the mobile web. Publishers can keep all the ad revenue if using their own ads, but Facebook gets a 30% cut if the ads are shown by Facebook.
2015	May 29	Product	Facebook confirms official support for GIFs. Autoplay settings for GIFs would be the same as those for videos: users who have video autoplay set to on (the default setting) will have GIFs autoplay when they scroll to the GIF in their news feed. Others can play the GIF manually by clicking the GIF button on the feed item with the GIF.
2015	June–August	Product	Facebook adds more features for pages to make it easier for businesses to use them. These include: allowing pages to display how quickly they respond to messages, allowing pages to send saved replies to messages, allowing pages to use private messages for customer support, and adding buy button integration to pages.
2015	June–July	Product	Facebook makes changes to its news feed algorithm in a few different directions. It relinquishes some control to users allowing them to dictate what they see first in the news feed. Also, it announces that it will start using information on how long people hover on a particular item in their news feed to gauge their level of interest in the item, in addition to the more explicit signals it currently uses (likes, comments, shares).
2015	August	Product	On August 5, Facebook launches live-streaming, initially restricted only to celebrities. Subsequently, on August 12, it announces that the feature will be made available to journalists and those with verified profiles.
2015	August 27	Userbase	Facebook announces that it has hit the milestone of 1 billion users accessing it on a single day.
2015	December	Product	Facebook announces that it will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps.
2016	January - March	Product	Facebook Live that was originally launched in August 2015 and limited to celebrities, becomes available to all U.S. iPhone users on January 28. On February 18, the global rollout begins. It becomes available to U.S. Android users in the week following February 26. Starting March 1, Facebook starts pushing live content more compared to older content. Commentators describe Facebook Live as marking Facebook's entry into the live-streaming space, competing with Twitter-owned Periscope.
2016	February 24	Product	Facebook releases Facebook Reactions to the general public. The feature allows people to use six additional reactions beyond just the "like" action to convey their reaction to a post. The new reactions are "love", "haha", "wow", "yay", "sad", and "anger". Although the names differ across languages, the emoticons used are the same across languages. Each user can add at most one reaction to a post. An early version of Reactions was released in October 2015 in Ireland and Spain.
2016	March 18	Product	Facebook provide "Basketball Game" function in Messager.
2016	April 12 and 13	Product	Facebook F8 for 2016 includes a number of announcements about the product roadmap. Key highlights include: Messenger chatbots and a new bot engine, open source virtual reality camera, more tools for Facebook apps and Facebook Live, allowing businesses to send sponsored messages to people who have messaged them in the past, more changes around improving rights management for videos, and inrceased support for React Native from Microsoft and Samsung.
2016	April 21	Product	Facebook announces that it is updating its news feed algorithm to take into account the time that a person spends reading the article, off Facebook (using various techniques to control for load time and article length). In the previous set of updates rolled out in June and July of 2015, Facebook had started taking into account the time people spend viewing the item in their news feed, but the new change takes into account the user's activity outside Facebook. The change is part of Facebook's Feed Quality Program, and is a result of research showing that people's activity on Facebook failed to fully capture the extent to which they were interested in particular items. Commentators believe that this is likely to lead to a significant reduction in the circulation of misleading clickbait on the social network.

See also

• Timeline of Twitter
• Timeline of Instagram
• Timeline of Pinterest
• Timeline of Snapchat
• Timeline of LinkedIn