Facebook Opens Registration Beyond Colleges

Facebook opened registration to anyone aged 13 or older with a valid email address in September 2006. Until then, the service had expanded from Harvard to other universities, then to high schools and selected organizations. Removing the school requirement changed Facebook from a campus network into a general social platform.

Technically, this meant preparing a rapidly growing application for a much broader graph of users and relationships. Social networks place unusual pressure on databases because a single page may depend on profiles, friendships, photos, messages, groups, and activity from many other accounts. Growth therefore required aggressive caching, database sharding, and internal tools for operating large clusters.

The decision also changed the product itself. A network built around relatively closed communities now had to solve identity, privacy, abuse, and news-feed ranking problems at Internet scale. Those engineering problems became central to social-media platforms over the following decade.