The Largest Social Network in the world Facebook turns 17.  Mark Zuckerberg on hi timeline shares his thoughts. Here is the verbatim:

17 years ago, the first students signed up for Facebook and started connecting with friends. It’s been a wild journey ever since and I want to thank all of you for being part of this community.

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together these last 17 years, but I’m even more optimistic about the years ahead.

The world faces historic challenges right now and we’re committed to doing our part to help. Last year, we ran the largest voter information campaign in recent history and helped more than 4 million people register and vote. This year, we’ll run the largest worldwide campaign promoting authoritative Covid vaccine information to help put this pandemic behind us.

We’re building the community infrastructure to support the diversity of communities needed for everyone in the world to join ones that are meaningful in their lives. I think this is one of the most important things we can do to help strengthen our social fabric.

We’re building privacy-focused social platforms from the bottom up based on end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp and Messenger, and then building lots of private social tools like groups, video calling, payments, co-watching, and more on top of that foundation.

We’re building commerce tools to give more than 200 million small businesses the same tools that historically only bigger companies have had — from tools to reach customers to ways to easily set up a shop on Facebook and Instagram even when your physical store is closed.

We’re building the next major computing platform with augmented and virtual reality. It will deliver the experience of “presence” — that you’re right there with another person. It will open opportunities by letting you teleport anywhere without having to commute.

And we’re building a new model of governance for online communities. The Oversight Board is one piece that provides independent and binding appeals, and now we’re working to establish more aspects of independent community governance in the years ahead.

If we can accomplish these goals, then the years ahead will be even more exciting than the 17 years so far. Thanks for being on this journey with us.