Everything about Facebook totally explained
Facebook is a
social networking website launched on
February 4,
2004. The free-access website is
privately owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a
campus community that some
American colleges and
preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while still a student at
Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the
Ivy League. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
Peter Thiel was the first person to fund the company, with an initial investment of
US$500,000. Features include a Wall for posting messages and Photos for uploading
digital photos. More than 70 million people worldwide visited the website in April 2008. Membership was initially restricted to students of
Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the
undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service.
Dustin Moskovitz and
Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to
Stanford,
Columbia, and
Yale. This expansion continued from April to June when it opened to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
Boston University,
Boston College,
Northeastern University, and all
Ivy League schools. Initially, high school networks required an invitation to join, but this was changed fifteen days later to allow anyone to join. Facebook had expanded membership eligibility to employees of 10 preselected companies by
April 26 2006, including
Amazon.com,
Apple Inc., and
Microsoft. Facebook finally became open to everyone on
September 11 2006, with the only requirements being a valid
email address and a minimum age of 13.
Funding
Facebook received its first investment of
US$500,000 in June 2004 from
PayPal co-founder
Peter Thiel in an
angel round. This was followed a year later by $12.8 million in
venture capital from
Accel Partners, and then $25 million more from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners. A
cash flow statement was leaked, showing that during the 2005
fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million. Microsoft approached Facebook in September 2007, proposing an investment in return for a 5% stake in the company. Microsoft would pay an estimated $300–500 million for the share. Microsoft announced on
October 24,
2007 that it purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $246 million. On
November 30,
2007,
Hong Kong billionaire
Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook.
BusinessWeek reported on
March 28,
2006 that a potential acquisition of the website was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high as $2 billion. With the sale of social networking website
MySpace to
News Corp on
July 19,
2005, rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. Zuckerberg had already said he didn't want to sell the company and denied rumors to the contrary. In late September, serious talks between Facebook and
Yahoo! took place concerning acquisition of the
social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion. Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's
MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic audience. Other companies, including
Google, expressed interest in September 2007 to buy a portion of Facebook. Amid the rumors, Zuckerberg claimed that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, stating on
July 17,
2007, "We're not really looking to sell the company. [...] We're not looking to
IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."
Website
Facebook users can choose to join one or more networks, organized by city, workplace, school, and region. These networks help users connect with members of the same network. Users can also connect with friends, giving them access to their friends' profiles.
The website is free to users, but generates revenue from advertising, including
banner ads. Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends.
Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving
banner advertising, and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's
advertisement inventory. According to
comScore, an internet
marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft but considerably less than
Yahoo! when compared with other web companies.
Features
The media often compares Facebook to
MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using
HTML and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows
plain text.
Facebook has a number of features for users to interact with. They include the
Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see,
Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification that tells a user that they've been poked),
Photos, where users can upload albums and photos, and
Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. A user's Wall is visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, which depends on their privacy settings. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only. Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, while others were concerned it made it too easy for other people to track down individual activities (such as changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users). In response to this dissatisfaction, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Users are now able to prevent friends from seeing updates about different types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.
Facebook Notes was introduced on
August 22,
2006, a blogging feature that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs from
Xanga,
LiveJournal,
Blogger, and other blogging services. which allows users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-based
instant messengers.
Facebook launched
Gifts on
February 8,
2007, which allows users to send
virtual gifts to their friends that appear on the recipient's profile. Gifts cost $1.00 each to purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to each gift. On
May 14,
2007, Facebook launched
Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads. Marketplace has been compared to
Craigslist by
CNET, which points out that the major difference between the two is that listings posted by a user on Marketplace are only seen by users that are in the same network as that user, whereas listings posted on Craigslist can be seen by anyone.
Platform
Facebook launched the Facebook Platform on
May 24,
2007, providing a
framework for
software developers to create
applications that interact with core Facebook features. A markup language called
Facebook markup language was introduced simultaneously; it's used to customize the "look and feel" of applications that developers create. Using the Platform, Facebook launched several new applications,
Applications that have been created on the Platform include
chess and
Scrabble, both which allow users to play games with their friends. These games are
asynchronous, meaning that a user's moves are saved on the website, allowing the next move to be made at any time rather than immediately after the previous move. Within a few months of launching the Facebook Platform, issues arose regarding "application
spam", which involves Facebook applications "spamming" users to request it be installed. Application spam has been considered one of the possible causes to the drop in visitors to Facebook starting from the beginning of 2008, when its growth had fallen from December 2007 to January 2008, its first drop since its launch in 2004.
Controversy
Due to its popularity, Facebook has been involved in several controversial events. In October 2005, the
University of New Mexico blocked access to Facebook from its campus computers and networks. It cited a violation of the university's
Acceptable Use Policy for abusing computer resources as the reason, stating the website forces use of the university's credentials for activity not related to the university. The school later unblocked Facebook after the website rectified the situation by displaying a notice on the login page stating the credentials used on the website are separate from the ones used for their school accounts. The
Ontario government also blocked access to Facebook for its employees in May 2007, stating the website was "not directly related to the workplace".
A notable ancillary effect of social networking websites like Facebook is the ability for participants to mourn publicly for a deceased individual. On
January 1,
2008, a memorial group on Facebook posted the identity of murdered
Toronto teenager Stefanie Rengel, whose family hadn't yet given the
Toronto Police Service their consent to release her name to the media. While police and Facebook staff attempted to comply with the privacy regulations by deleting posts mentioning her name, they noted it was difficult to effectively police individual users who repeatedly republished the deleted information.
Due to the open nature of Facebook, several countries have banned access to it including
Syria and
Iran. The Syrian government cited the ban was on the premise that the website promoted attacks on authorities. The government also feared Israeli infiltration of Syrian social networks on Facebook. When launching Beacon, Facebook stated "no personally identifiable information is shared with an advertiser in creating a Social Ad", and that "Facebook users will only see Social Ads to the extent their friends are sharing information with them." After Facebook was criticized for collecting more user information for advertisers than was previously stated, Zuckerberg publicly apologized on
December 5,
2007 for the way Facebook launched Beacon, saying, "The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends."
ConnectU
Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss, owners of the social networking website HarvardConnection, changed its name to ConnectU in September 2004 and filed a
lawsuit against Facebook, alleging Zuckerberg had illegally used
source code intended for the website they asked him to build for them. Facebook later requested the court case that ConnectU filed against them be dismissed, citing ConnectU's "broad brush allegations are unsupported by evidence". The case was dismissed by a
United States federal judge. ConnectU filed another lawsuit against Facebook on
March 11,
2008, continuing the case; a resolution is still pending
as of May 2008.
Privacy
Several concerns have emerged regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and
data mining. Two
MIT students were able to download over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT,
New York University, the
University of Oklahoma, and
Harvard University) using an automated
shell script, as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on
December 14,
2005. The possibility of data mining remains open, as evidenced in May 2008, when the
BBC technology program "
Click" demonstrated that personal details of Facebook users and their friends could be stolen by submitting malicious applications.
Privacy proponents have criticized the site's privacy agreement, which states: "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile." Another clause that received criticism concerned Facebook's right to sell a user's data to private companies, stating: "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we've a relationship." This concern was addressed by Facebook spokesman
Chris Hughes who said, "Simply put, we've never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."
Concerns have also been raised regarding the difficulty of deleting user accounts. Previously, Facebook only allowed users to "deactivate" their accounts so that their profile was no longer visible. However, any information the user had entered into the website and on their profile remained on the website's
servers. This outraged many users who wished to remove their accounts permanently, citing reasons such as the inability to erase "embarrassing or overly-personal online profiles from their student days as they entered the job market, for fear employers would locate the profiles". Facebook changed its account deletion policies on
February 29,
2008, allowing users to contact the website to request that their accounts be permanently deleted.
Reception
Facebook has more than 70 million active users worldwide. According to
Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007.
Quantcast ranks the website 16th in terms of traffic, and
Compete.com ranks it 20th. The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.
Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several
English-speaking countries, including Canada and the United Kingdom. The website has won numerous awards and accolades, such as being considered one of the "Top 100 Classic Websites" by
PC Magazine in 2007, and winning the "People's Voice Award" from the
Webby Awards in 2008. In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a
New Jersey-based
limited liability company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named the second most popular thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and only ranked lower than the
iPod.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Facebook'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://facebook.totallyexplained.com">Facebook Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
