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Facebook
Facebook is a social networking website, launched
on February 4, 2004. Facebook was founded by Mark
Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student. Initially
the membership of Facebook was restricted to students
of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded
to MIT, Boston University, Boston College, and
all Ivy League schools within two months. Many
individual universities were added in rapid succession
over the next year. Eventually, people with a
university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address
from institutions across the globe were eligible
to join. Networks were then initiated for high
schools on February 27, 2006 and some large companies.
Since September 11, 2006, anyone 13 or older may
join. Users can select to join one or more participating
networks, such as a school, place of employment,
or geographic region.
The
site has more than 62 million active users (including
non-collegiate members) worldwide.[4] From September
2006 to September 2007 the site's traffic ranking
increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa.[5]
It is the most popular website for uploading photos,
with 14 million uploaded daily.[4]
The
name of the site refers to the paper facebooks
depicting members of the campus community that
some U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give
to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a
way to get to know other people on campus.
Operations
The
site is free to users and generates revenue from
advertising including banner ads and sponsored
groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to
be over $1.5 million per week).[6] 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. According
to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students in
[previously] supported colleges have a profile
[on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60%
log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a
week, and 93% log in at least once a month."
According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook,
"People spend an average of 19 minutes a
day on Facebook."[7] In a 2006 study conducted
by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited
liability company specialising in research concerning
the college student market, Facebook was named
as the second most "in" thing among
undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and losing
only to the iPod.[8]
History
Facebook's funding
Mark
Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in
February 2004, while attending Harvard University,
with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo
Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half
of the undergraduate population at Harvard were
registered on the service. At that time, Zuckerberg
was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes
for site promotion and Facebook expanded to Stanford,
Columbia, and Yale.[9] This expansion continued
in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest
of Ivy League and a few other schools. At the
end of the school year, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz
moved out to Palo Alto, California with McCollum,
who had a summer internship at Electronic Arts.
They rented a house near Stanford University where
they were joined by Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker.
Soon McCollum decided to leave EA and help with
the development of Facebook and a companion website,
Wirehog, full-time. In September, Divya Narendra,
Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners
of the social networking website HarvardConnection,
subsequently changed to ConnectU, filed a lawsuit
against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had
illegally used source code intended for the website
they asked him to build for them.[10][11] Also
at that time, Facebook received approximately
$500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in
an angel round. By December, Facebook's user base
had exceeded one million.
2005
In
May 2005, Facebook raised $12.8 million in venture
capital from Accel Partners.[12] On August 23,
2005, Facebook bought the domain name facebook.com
from the Aboutface Corporation for $200,000 and
dropped "the" from its name. At that
time the site was overhauled, a change intended
to make profile pages more user-friendly, according
to Zuckerberg. Also that month McCollum went back
to Harvard although he continued to serve as a
consultant and returned to work on staff during
the summers. As before, Hughes remained in Cambridge
while he performed his duties as company spokesperson.
Then, on September 2, 2005, Zuckerberg launched
the high school iteration of Facebook, calling
it the next logical thing to do. While initially
described as separate "communities"
to which users needed to be invited to participate,
within only fifteen days most high school networks
did not require a password to join (although registration
with Facebook was still necessary.) By October,
Facebook's expansion had trickled down to most
small universities and junior colleges in the
United States, Canada, and the UK, in addition
to having expanded to twenty-one universities
in the United Kingdom, the entire Instituto Tecnologico
y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM)
system in Mexico, the entire University of Puerto
Rico network in Puerto Rico, and the whole University
of the Virgin Islands network in the U.S. Virgin
Islands. On December 11, 2005, universities in
Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook
network, bringing its size to more than 2,000
colleges and more than 25,000 high schools throughout
the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United
Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.[13]
2006
On
February 27, 2006, Facebook began allowing college
students to add high school students as friends
due to requests from users.[14] About a month
later, on March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported
that a potential acquisition of the site was under
negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer
of $750 million, and it was rumored that the asking
price was as high as $2 billion.[15] In April,
Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital
Partners invested an additional $25 million in
the site.[16] In May, Facebook's network extended
into India, at Indian Institutes of Technology
(IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).
The following month Facebook threatened to seek
costs of up to $100,000 from Quizsender.com for
copyright infringement for allegedly copying the
"look and feel" of Facebook.[17][18]
On July 25, new services were offered in the site
that would potentially produce additional revenue.
A promotion was arranged between Facebook and
iTunes, in which members of the Apple Students
group would receive a free 25 song sampler each
week until September 30 in various music genres.
The promotion's purpose was to make students more
familiar with and enthusiastic about each service
as fall classes approached.[19] In the early half
of August, Facebook added universities in Germany
and high schools in Israel, (Haifa, Jerusalem,
and Qiryat Gat) to its network. On the 22nd of
that month, Facebook introduced Facebook Notes,
a blogging feature with tagging, embedded images,
and other features, also allowing the importation
of blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and
other blogging services. This newly added feature
also included the common blog feature of allowing
readers to comment on users' entries. On September
11, 2006, Facebook became open to all users of
the Internet, prompting protest from its existing
user base.[20] Two weeks later, Facebook opened
registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address.[21]
2007
On
May 10, 2007, Facebook announced a plan to add
free classified advertisements to its website,
making it a competitor with established online
companies such as Craigslist.[22] This feature,
known as Facebook Marketplace, went live on May
14, 2007; Facebook launched an API that allows
the development of applications to be used on
the site, known as Facebook Platform.[23]
In
June, the partnership begun the previous year
between iTunes and Facebook continued, with the
download service again offering free music samplers
through the Apple Students group.
In
July, Facebook announced its first acquisition,
purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe
Hewitt. In August, the company was featured in
a Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy in the magazine's
annual college edition.[24] Facebook hired YouTube's
former CFO Gideon Yu on July 24, 2007. Gideon
Yu succeeded Michael Sheridan.[25]
In
October Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share in the
company for $240 million.[26] An outright sale
of Facebook is said to be unlikely as founder
Mark Zuckerberg would like to keep it independent.[citation
needed]
On
November 7, 2007, Facebook announced Facebook
Ads; Facebook Beacon, a marketing initiative which
includes a system for websites to allow users
to share chosen information about their activities
on the sites with their Facebook friends ;[27]
the capability of businesses to host pages on
Facebook for various brands, products and services
(Facebook Pages); a targeted ad serving program
based on user and friend profile and activity
data (Facebook Social Ads); and a service for
providing businesses with advertisement analytic
data including performance metrics (Facebook Insights).
With respect to privacy, Facebook states that
"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".[28] Facebook
Ads replaces the site's previous Facebook Flyers
program.[29] On November 30, 2007, it was reported
that Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing had invested
$60 million in Facebook.[30]
On
5 December 2007, Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized
for the way that Facebook launched the Beacon
system, 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."[31] Beacon
can now be disabled through a new External websites
section in Privacy.[32]
Statistics
(Approximate
numbers as of January 2008)[4]
* Active users: Over 60 million
* Daily new user average: 250,000
* Page views: Over 65 billion per month
* Searches: Over 500 million per month[107]
* Search index size: 200GB
* Largest countries: US, Canada, UK
Remaining top 10 countries in order of active
users (outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Australia,
Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, France,
Hong Kong.
* Largest networks: London, UK[108]: 2,000,124[109]
and Toronto, Canada: 1,012,604[110]
* Largest United States college networks: Ohio
State University: 72,144[111], University of Minnesota:
72,288[112], Texas A&M University: 76,014[113],
Penn State University: 97,448[114][115]
* Traffic rank: 7th[5]
* Photos: 1.7 billion (which averages to about
44 photos per user)[116]
On
March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com
of American youths in the United States discovered
Facebook was the most viewed site among all respondents
with more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the
site than males (56%).[117]
In
2007, the word "facebook" came in 2nd
on Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year.[118]
In
late 2007, early 2008, disparate youth groups
began referring to Facebook through a variety
of nicknames specific to said group's geography.[citation
needed] One of the earliest such nicknames to
catch on was 'facce-book' (fachee-book), as an
homage to the accents of the Portuguese and Italian
enclaves in the west end of Toronto.(Credit: Wikipedia).
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