Facebook is the hottest Social Networking medium on the Internet right now, and is showing no signs of slowing down. But imagine if Facebook was known by some other ****** name ? It may be silly to think that a name would have such a significant impact on the success of a venture, but this is one situation in which it probably does.

Back when Zuckerberg started Facebook, it was called TheFacebook and was a hobby website to connect students at Harvard University. The name Facebook.com had already been registered in 1997, so Zuckerberg registered the name, TheFacebook.com in 2004.

Within two months of its launch, it continued to grow rapidly, reaching almost every single college in the US. Then in 2005, TheFacebook buys the name Facebook.com and is officially called Facebook after that. Restricting accounts to only those with a email addresses from a school, Zuckerberg clearly was focused on connecting students.

With that said, what if the names yearbook.com, classmates.com and myyearbook.com were available at the time Zuckerberg started this “hobby”? There’s a VERY high probability that Zuckerberg would have purchased one of those names instead of thefacebook.com. Had he purchased any of those other names, Facebook would not have been able to open the doors to everyone in 2006 - it just doesn’t make sense conceptually. You can’t open up a site with a name like classmates.com or yearbook.com to non-students because it implies that it is a school-related thing.

Fortunately for Zuckerberg, the word ‘facebook’ is not widely known and weakly associated with schools. This gave them the flexibility to scale out of the college/school context - something that Yearbook.com and Classmates.com wish they can do, but can’t. Without opening the doors to all users, Facebook wouldn’t have been able to create such a powerful platform - and without such a platform, they would not be as hot as they are right now.

Below are some key domain name registration dates that are pretty interesting:

* Yearbook.com registered on Jan 4, 1995
* Classmates.com registered on Nov 16, 1994
* Facebook.com first registered on March 29, 1997
* Thefacebook.com registered on Jan 11, 2004
* Facebook buys facebook.com for $200,000 on August 23, 2005.

Popularity: 7% [?]