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This article is about the website. For the collection of photographs of people after which it is named, see Facebook (directory).
 | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | Cambridge, Massachusetts[1] (2004) |
| Founder | Mark Zuckerberg Chris Hughes Dustin Moskovitz Eduardo Saverin |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, U.S. (main headquarters; serves the Americas) Dublin, Ireland (headquarters for Europe, Africa, Middle East) Seoul, South Korea (headquarters for Asia) Wellington, New Zealand (headquarters for Oceania), Hyderabad, India[2] (Headquarters for South Asia) |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Mark Zuckerberg (CEO) Chris Cox (VP of Product)Sheryl Sandberg (COO) |
| Revenue |  US$800 million (2009 est.)[3] |
| Employees | 1700+ (2010)[4] |
| Website | facebook.com |
| Alexa rank |  2 (November 2010)[5] |
| Type of site | Social network service |
| Advertising | Banner ads, referral marketing, Casual games |
| Registration | Required |
| Users | 500 million[6] (active in July 2010)[N 1] |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Launched | February 4, 2004 |
| Current status | Active |
Screenshot[show] | |
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[8] The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[9] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"[10] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.[11]
Contents[hide] |
History
Main articles: History of Facebook and Timeline of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not,[12] and according to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".[13]
The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped.[15] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.[14] He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.[16] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[17]
Just six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.[18] The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.[19]
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.[20] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[21] This expansion continued when it opened as well to all other Ivy League schools and Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[22][23]
Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.[24] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[21] It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[25] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[26]
Date | Users | Days later | Monthly growth[N 2] |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 26, 2008 | 100[27] | 1,665 | 178.38% |
| April 8, 2009 | 200[28] | 225 | 13.33% |
| September 15, 2009 | 300[29] | 150 | 10% |
| February 5, 2010 | 400[30] | 143 | 6.99% |
| July 21, 2010 | 500[6] | 166 | 4.52% |
| — | 600 | 133 (ongoing) | — |
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.[36] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.[37] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[38] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time.[39] In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for share of privately held companies, Facebook value was $41 billion (surpassing EBay's slightly), and it became the third-largest US Web Company after Google and Amazon.[40]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.[41] Facebook also became the top social network across eight individual markets in Asia—the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top positions in certain markets, including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea, and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc in Taiwan.[citation needed]
 | Wikinews has related news: Facebook reaches 500 million users |
Controversy
Facebook has been met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Pakistan,[42] Syria,[43] the People's Republic of China,[44] Vietnam,[45] Iran,[46] Uzbekistan[47], and Bangladesh[48]. It has also been banned at many workplaces to prevent the wasting of employees' time.[49] The privacy of Facebook users has also been an issue, and the safety of user accounts has been compromised several times. Facebook has settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.[50]Company
Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major websites. For banner advertisements, they have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks on Facebook compared to the Web as a whole.[54] This means that a smaller percentage of Facebook's users click on advertisements than many other large websites. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),[55] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).[56]
Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, confirmed that successful advertising campaigns can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.[57] Competing social network MySpace's CTR, in comparison, is about 0.1%, 2.5 times better than Facebook's but still low compared to many other websites. Explanations for Facebook's low CTR include the fact that Facebook's users are more technologically savvy and therefore use ad blocking software to hide advertisements, the users are younger and therefore are better at ignoring advertising messages, and that on MySpace, users spend more time browsing through content while on Facebook, users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements.[58]
| Year | Revenue | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | $52[59] | — |
| 2007 | $150[60] | 188% |
| 2008 | $280[61] | 87% |
| 2009 | $800[3] | 186% |
| 2010[N 3] | $1,100[62] | 38% |
Facebook has over 1,700 employees, and offices in 12 countries.[66] Regarding Facebook ownership, Mark Zuckerberg owns 24% of the company, Accel Partners owns 10%, Dustin Moskovitz owns 6%, Digital Sky Technologies owns 5%, Eduardo Saverin owns 5%, Sean Parker owns 4%, Peter Thiel owns 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners own between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft owns 1.3%, Li Ka-shing owns 0.75%, the Interpublic Group owns less than 0.5%, a small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, California U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company, and the remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors.[67] Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.[68]
Website
Main articles: Facebook features and Facebook Platform
The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization.[73] Another difference is Facebook’s requirement that users utilize their true identity, a demand that MySpace does not make.[74] MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.[75] Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact. They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see;[76] Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked);[77] Photos, where users can upload albums and photos;[78] and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions.[79] Depending on privacy settings, anyone who can see a user's profile can also view that user's Wall. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.[76]
In response to this dissatisfaction, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent friends from seeing updates about certain types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.[83] On February 23, 2010, Facebook was granted US patent 7669123 on certain aspects of their News Feed. The patent covers News Feeds where links are provided so that one user can participate in the same activity of another user.[84] The patent may encourage Facebook to pursue action against websites that violate the patent, which may potentially include websites such as Twitter.[85]
One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos.[86] Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. As of May 2009, this limit has been increased to 200 photos per album.[87][88][89][90]
Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user's friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to "tag", or label users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.[91]
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.[94][95] On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads.[96] 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.[97]
On July 20, 2008, Facebook introduced "Facebook Beta", a significant redesign of its user interface on selected networks. The Mini-Feed and Wall were consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections, and an effort was made to create a "cleaner" look.[98] After initially giving users a choice to switch, Facebook began migrating all users to the new version beginning in September 2008.[99] On December 11, 2008, it was announced that Facebook was testing a simpler signup process.[100]
On June 13, 2009, Facebook introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can be linked with simpler URLs such as
http://www.facebook.com/facebook as opposed to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728.[101] Many new smartphones offer access to the Facebook services either through their web-browsers or applications. An official Facebook application is available for the iPhone OS, the Android OS, and the WebOS. Nokia and Research In Motion both provide Facebook applications for their own mobile devices. More than 150 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices across 200 mobile operators in 60 countries.On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service. In a media event that day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it's not email." The launch of such a feature had been anticipated for some time before the announcement, with some calling it a "Gmail killer." The system, to be available to all of the website's users, combines text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and regular messages, and will include privacy settings similar to those of other Facebook services. Codenamed "Project Titan," Facebook Messages took 15 months to develop.[102][103]
Reception
See also: Criticism of Facebook
According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008.[104] ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 130 million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of 8.6 million people.[105] According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 2nd.[106] Quantcast ranks the website 2nd in the U.S. in traffic,[107] and Compete.com ranks it 2nd in the U.S.[108] The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 50 billion uploaded cumulatively.[109] In 2010, Sophos's "Security Threat Report 2010" polled over 500 firms, 60% of which responded that they believed that Facebook was the social network that posed the biggest threat to security, well ahead of MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn.[53]Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several English-speaking countries, including Canada,[110] the United Kingdom,[111] and the United States.[112][113][114][115] In regional Internet markets, Facebook penetration is highest in North America (69 percent), Middle East-Africa (67 percent), Latin America (58 percent), Europe (57 percent), and Asia-Pacific (17 percent).[116]
The website has won awards such as placement into the "Top 100 Classic Websites" by PC Magazine in 2007,[117] and winning the "People's Voice Award" from the Webby Awards in 2008.[118] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based 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.[119]
On March 2010, Judge Richard Seeborg issued an order approving the class settlement in Lane v. Facebook, Inc., the class action lawsuit arising out of Facebook's Beacon program.
In 2010, Facebook won the Crunchie “Best Overall Startup Or Product” the third year in a row[120] and was recognized as one of the "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.[121] However, in a July 2010 survey performed by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook received a score of 64 out of 100, placing it in the bottom 5% of all private sector companies in terms of customer satisfaction, alongside industries such as the IRS e-file system, airlines, and cable companies. Reasons for why Facebook scored so poorly include privacy problems, frequent changes to the website's interface, the results returned by the News Feed, and spam.[122]
In December 2008, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid protocol to serve court notices to defendants. It is believed to be the world's first legal judgement that defines a summons posted on Facebook as legally binding.[123] In March 2009, the New Zealand High Court associate justice David Glendall allowed for the serving of legal papers on Craig Axe by the company Axe Market Garden via Facebook.[124] Employers (such as Virgin Atlantic Airways) have also used Facebook as a means to keep tabs on their employees and have even been known to fire them over posts they have made.[125]
By 2005, the use of Facebook had already become so ubiquitous that the generic verb "facebooking" had come into use to describe the process of browsing others' profiles or updating one's own.[126] In 2008, Collins English Dictionary declared "Facebook" as their new Word of the Year.[127] In December 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared their word of the year to be the verb "unfriend", defined as "To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight” ".[128]
As of April 2010, according to The New York Times, countries with most Facebook users are the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia.[129] Indonesia has become the country with the second largest number of Facebook users, after the United States, with 24 million users, or 10% of Indonesia's population.[130] Also in early 2010, Openbook was established, an avowed parody website (and privacy advocacy website)[131] that enables text-based searches of those Wall posts that are available to "Everyone", i.e. to everyone on the Internet.
Writers for The Wall Street Journal found in 2010 that Facebook apps were transmitting identifying information to "dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies". The apps used an HTTP referrer which exposed the user's identity and sometimes their friends'. Facebook said, "We have taken immediate action to disable all applications that violate our terms".[132]
Political impact
Over 1,000,000 people installed the Facebook application 'US politics' in order to take part, and the application measured users' responses to specific comments made by the debating candidates.[137] This debate showed the broader community what many young students had already experienced: Facebook was an extremely popular and powerful new way to interact and voice opinions. An article written by Michelle Sullivan of Uwire.com illustrates how the "facebook effect" has affected youth voting rates, support by youth of political candidates, and general involvement by the youth population in the 2008 election.[138]
In February 2008, a Facebook group called "One Million Voices Against FARC" organized an event that saw hundreds of thousands of Colombians march in protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC (from the group's Spanish name).[139] In August 2010, one of North Korea's official government websites, Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook.[140]
In media
| Wikinews has news involving Facebook: |
- At age 102, Ivy Bean of Bradford, England joined Facebook in 2008, making her one of the oldest people ever on Facebook. An inspiration to other residents,[141] she quickly became more widely known and several fan pages were made in her honor. She visited Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, in Downing Street early in 2010.[142] Some time after creating her Facebook page, Bean also joined Twitter, when she passed the maximum number of friends allowed by Facebook. She became the oldest person to ever use the Twitter website. At the time of her death in July 2010, she had 4,962 friends on Facebook and more than 56,000 followers on Twitter. Her death was widely reported in the media and she received tributes from several notable media personalities.[143]
- "FriendFace", a December 2008 episode of the British sitcom, The IT Crowd, parodied Facebook and social networking sites, in general.[144]
- American author, Ben Mezrich, published a book in July 2009 about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, titled The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.[145]
- In response to the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day controversy and the ban of the website in Pakistan, an Islamic version of the website was created, called MillatFacebook.[146]
- "You Have 0 Friends", an April 2010 episode of the American animated comedy series, South Park, parodied Facebook.[147]
- The Social Network, a drama film directed by David Fincher about the founding of Facebook, was released October 1, 2010.[148] The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, and Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The film was written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book. The film was distributed by Columbia Pictures. No staff members of Facebook, including Zuckerberg, were involved with the project. However, one of Facebook's co-founders, Eduardo Saverin, was a consultant for Mezrich's book. Mark Zuckerberg has said that The Social Network is inaccurate.[149]
- Recently Amitabh Thakur, an officer of the Indian Police Service in Uttar Pradesh has taken up the project of writing one book each in Hindi and English based on his inputs from the social networking site Facebook, which is underway
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