This would be an interesting concept to discuss about, I want to know how major sites became the sites that they are today. By major sites, I mean sites like Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, Facebook and Myspace.

More commercial sites such as eBay and Microsoft can also be included, but I'm mainly looking at social-networking and Web 2.0 things. Wikimedia is a library of information, media, quotes, dictionaries, etc, etc which makes it so popular due to the fact of what it is. Google came from 2 high school students who wanted a way to find information on the Internet in a more efficient way (or so I've heard).

The one that I'm most interested in knowing more about here is Facebook, as shown in topic. I know that he started Facebook in his university and eventually expanded it throughout other universities and eventually through high schools, colleges and now everyone can register. But what ddi he do in order to grow popularity and to create this amazing web service?

What are your theories? How did they start? By a huge book of plans and goal? By a single PHP page? By getting aliens to program their files onto a bunch of servers?

Well Facebook History is here.
Its all about perseverence struggle impact & popularity & of course great programming.
Popularity History:
Mark Zuckerberg founded The Facebook in 2004 while he was studying at Harward university. THE was dropped in 2005 when the company purchased facebook.com domain name in 05. Initially it was only for Harward students. But the popularity increased rapidly. At the same time Dustin Moskovitz & Chris Hughes joined to promote the website. It soon expanded to Stanford, Columbia & Yale. Later till Apr 05 it expanded with MIT, Boston College & University, Northeastern University, & all Ivy League schools within 2 months. Later High school iteration of Facebook was launched in September calling it the next Logical thing to do. By the end of o5 facebook had more than 2000 colleges & over 25000 schools over 7 countries. It also expanded membership to employees of 10 preselected companies till Apr 06. Later in Sept it was for everyone
Funding History:
Facebook recieved its first investment from Pay Pal co-founder Peter Thiel in June 2004. Followed by Accel Partners, Greylock Partners & Meritech Partners. Microsoft approached facebook in Sept 07 proposing an investment in return of 5% stake.
But it actually bought only 1.6%

I wasn't exactly looking for that information. What I mean is how they founded the company, like how did they start?

I don't personally know the answer, but I could theorize that all websites start in pretty much one of two ways--either they have inspiration to create something then learn how to do it, or they know how to do it and are just playing with it to cry and create something.

I would say that Facebook was started by the former. The guy that created it probably just wanted a network that could connect him with all his buddies in his classes at school. In which case, his website started the same way that most do. Now the fact that it took off as well as it did was probably dumb luck. I mean, an unimaginable number (at least for me haha) were already using social networking websites, but they were becoming cluttered since anyone could join, including bots, unfortunately.

So now people were suddenly liking Facebook better because there were no bots--only students. So naturally students wanted to be a part of it!

It wasn't that the site was particularily magical, it just happened to be everything the world was looking for at that time.

So yes, if you can see what the world needs right now, and put it into a website, yours will be popular soon enough too! I'm not saying anything other than you really just need to know what a community needs to have popularity.

- Jared