(a brief history of timeline)

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Facebook. It just turned fourteen, making it the youngest juggernaut in history, as well as the only software ever created that’s actually older than the guy who created it.

Facebook. It’s ubiquitous, although at age fourteen it’s not yet old enough to know what “ubiquitous” means. If you haven’t heard of it, you’re lying. In fact, you’re probably logged into it right now, like nearly one out of every three people on this planet, most of whom don’t care what “ubiquitous” means, because they’re too busy trying to eat.

Invented in a college dorm room in early 2004, Facebook has become the Archie Bunker of the internet — we love to hate it, and we complain about it, and we can’t stand it, and we think we’re better than that, and we never. miss. a. day.

Last week, Facebook announced that they’ve hit another milestone: there are now over 2.2 billion humans logging into Facebook every month to tell us what they’re planning to make for dinner. Two-point-two billion. To put that into some perspective, if you grabbed five random Earthlings, at least one of them would punch you, but my point here is that at least two of the five are active monthly users of Facebook.

The guy who Dr. Frankenstein’d the Facebook uber-site in his dorm room is a young man named Mark Zuckerberg, a man so famous that Micro$oft Word’s spell-checker recognizes “Zuckerberg” as a correctly-spelled noun. (Not to be bitter, but Micro$oft has no clue who I am, even though during the course of my life I’ve spent about 40 gillion dollars on their software, some of which has never suddenly caught fire.)

Mr. Zuckerberg, who’s one of those lucky guys who looks like he’s still about two years shy from getting his driver’s license, is actually thirty-three years old. Not that that’s particularly ancient — I have shirts older than that. By the time citizen Z was born, I’d already been to prison. But Mark managed to turn a sophomoric chick-ranking project into the world’s most popular place to type LOL.

According to the internet, which was invented by either Al Gore or Geraldo Rivera (source: Geraldo Rivera), Zuckerberg’s original Facebook project during college was named FaceMash, because, you know, alcohol and college. The idea was to present side-by-side pictures of two female students, and then let Mark’s not-at-all infantile guy friends play “hot or not,” because, you know, guys and alcohol and college. And according to the internet, during its first four hours online, FaceMash initially attracted 450 visitors who, curiously, all claimed to be named Joe. (To this day, some fourteen years later, not one of those guys has ever impressed an actual female.)

It’s staggering to comprehend. Two billion-plus bipeds have Facebook accounts, though the jury’s still out on the number of Facebook users with opposable thumbs. At this moment, Earth’s most populous country (China) only has 1.4 billion citizens, unless I learn to type faster. That’s more adherents than Earth’s most popular hobby (making more adherents), Earth’s most popular religion (dieting), or Kim Kardashian’s Twitter followers (see opposable thumbs).

After FaceMash.com failed to win any Academy Awards or deliver any vapid but Kama Sutra-capable hot chicks, Mark decided to run with the website name “TheFacebook,” as if he were a 1960’s-era British Invasion band. (Hi, and thanks for visiting TheKinks.com! Press “Lola” to choose your gender!)

And it grew, and grew, and grew. In 2006, Mark reportedly turned down an offer to sell Facebook, for $750 million, to a guy that Geraldo Rivera claimed to have once dated on an airport runway in Eastern Europe. Then, in 2012, Facebook’s cyber-father filed for an IPO (Insanely Priced Outfit), making Facebook the third largest corporate fund-generator in U.S. history (just ahead of AT&T Wireless and just behind the Clinton political machine).

Who knows what will happen next? At this point, Facebook new recruit recruiters have pretty much exhausted their human resources. To continue pleasing their investors, they’ll have to start marketing to other species, like insects, and Geraldo Rivera.

I’m going with the insects. After all, if any lifeform on Earth knows how to spell “ubiquitous,” it’s an ant.

Or a lawyer.