In July 2004, Hughes told Business Week Online that .com hoped to expand to 100 schools by last fall. Today, the site has more 3.8 million registered college-affiliated users from 1,531 different North American colleges. Hughes said the site will include every college in the United States, totalling more than 2,000, by this coming Monday.

Last May, the venture-capital firm Accel Partners announced it would invest $13 million in .com. Founder and CEO Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06-’08 said at the time that the influx of money would allow the site to improve the display of advertisements and add new features.

But even as the site continues to expand to millions of students across the country, Hughes said the company has not forgotten its modest beginnings.

“Harvard kids, better than anyone else, know that facebook used to be a dinky little site for one college,” Hughes said. “But it’s huge at this point. It’s a very real business with lots of employees. Mark went from being a Harvard student programming in his dorm room to CEO of a multimillion-dollar corporation.”

Internally, the recent redesign was deemed Operation Quail, apparently inspired by a quail hunting scene in the recent movie “Wedding Crashers.”

“Our whole culture is about being funny and creative,” Hughes said.

—Staff writer Sam Teller can be reached at steller@fas.harvard.edu.