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| CATEGORIES ABOUT FACEBOOK | |
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Facebook is a Social Networking Website which was launched on February 4 , 2004 . Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard University . It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools ( Boston College , Boston University , MIT , Tufts ), Stanford , Northwestern , 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) Email Address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies. Since September 11 2006 , it has been made available to any Email Address 2 user who inputs a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a High School , place of employment, or geographic region. As of July 2007 , the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 34 million active members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).3 In July 2007 4 it was ranked between top 10–13 web sites, and was the number one site for photos in the United States , ahead of public sites such as Flickr , with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.5 It is also the sixth most visited site in the United States.6 The author is quoting facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who is cites unnamed Associated Press reports. The name of the site refers to the depicting members of the campus community that US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff. 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).7 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 supported colleges have a profile [on the site . 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."8 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 .9 ORIGINS AND EXPANSION 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 MIT , Boston University , and Boston College . This expansion continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. The following month, Zuckerberg, McCollum, Hughes, and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto , California , to continue work on Facebook's development with additional help from Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker . In September, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners of the social networking website ConnectU , filed a Lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally used Source Code intended for a website they asked him to build for them.1011 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 $12.7 million in Venture Capital from Accel Partners .12 On August 23 , 2005 , Aboutface Corporation sold the Domain Name facebook.com to Facebook for $200,000. The website moved to this new domain name and dropped "the" from its name. As a part of the move, the site was overhauled to make profile pages more user-friendly, according to Zuckerberg. Afterwards, McCollum and Hughes returned to Harvard, although Hughes remained the site's spokesperson and McCollum remained on as a consultant and doing staff work during the summer. Then, on September 2 , 2005 , Zuckerberg launched the high school iteration of Facebook, calling it the next logical thing to do. At first, it was a completely separate entity to which users needed to be invited to join. However, in just fifteen days, most high school networks did not require a password to join. By October, Facebook's expansion had trickled down to most small universities and Junior College s 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 , more than 11,000,000 users worldwide.13 2006 On for allegedly copying the "look and feel" of Facebook.1617 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 Genre s. The promotion's purpose was to make students more familiar with and enthusiastic about each service as fall classes approached.18 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.19 Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address (see Below ).20 2007 On 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.21 SITE FEATURES The Wall The Wall is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. One user's wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and different users' wall posts show up in an individual's News Feed. Many users use their friend's walls for leaving short, temporal notes. More private discourse is saved for Messages, which are sent to a person's Inbox, and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the Message, much like Email . In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the wall 22, whereas previously the wall was limited to textual content only. Gifts In February 2007 , Facebook added a new gift feature to the website. Friends could send "gifts" -- small icons of novelty items designed by former Apple designer Susan Kare -- to each other by selecting one from Facebook's virtual gift shop and adding a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient's wall with the giver's message, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately, in which case the giver's name and message is not displayed to other users. Additionally, all gifts (including private gifts) received by a user are displayed in the recipient's "gift box" (right above their wall on their profile), marked with either the First Name of the user (for public gifts) or the word "Private." An "Anonymous" option is also available, by which anyone with profile access can see the gift, but only the recipient will see the message. No one will see the giver's name, and the gift will go in the recipient's gift box but not the wall. Some Facebook users are given one free gift to give; each additional gift given by a user costs US$1.00. The initial selection of gifts was Valentine's Day themed, and 50% of the proceeds received through February 2007 were donated to the charity Susan G. Komen For The Cure . After the month of February, the proceeds were no longer donated. Soon after, Facebook began making one new gift available each day, most of which had a limited supply or were available for a limited time. The daily new gift is advertised on every user's home page. With the advent of Applications came a way to subvert the required US$1.00 payment; however, the gifts in the "Free Gifts" application, created by Zachary Allia23, are not the same as the official gifts, as they are displayed in a different manner. Marketplace In May 2007, Facebook introduced the Facebook Marketplace allowing users to post free classified ads within the following categories: For Sale, Housing, Jobs, and place is available for all Facebook users and is currently free. Pokes Facebook includes a "poke" feature which allows one user to send a "poke" to another. In principle this is intended to serve as a "nudge" to attract the attention of the other user. However while many Facebook users, as intended, use the feature to attract attention or say hello,24 some users construe it as a sexual advance.25 This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group entitled "Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex," which, as of September 2007, has more than 250,000 members. Friends often engage in what is known as a "poke war," where the poke is exchanged back and forth continuously between two users by using the "poke back" feature. The user who neglects to return the poke promptly while still remaining an active user of Facebook is said to be the loser. There are several new applications such as "X Me" and "SuperPoke!", that allow users to do more than just poke other users. They can do various things using these applications such as hug, pinch, bite, kiss, tickle, or trip. Status The "status" feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions. Facebook prompts the status update with "(User name) is..." and Facebook users fill in the rest. Status updates are noted in the "Recently updated" section of a users' friend list. After the Virginia Tech Massacre , one Virginia Tech Facebook member updated her status to let friends and family know she was safe.26 Applications On May 24 , 2007 , Facebook launched the Facebook Platform27, which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. Among the most popular applications are Top Friends , which allows users to select and display their favorite friends; Graffiti , which gives users a visual version of Facebook's wall; and ILike , a social music discovery service that features concert information and a music trivia game, similar to the one featured on the IPod . Third-party websites such as Adonomics , which provides application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate , Inside Facebook and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. Even games such as chess and Scrabble are available. On August 29 2007 Facebook made a big change to the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, in order to give more attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of users was giving an advantage to highly viral yet useless applications.28 On seed program dedicated solely to Facebook applications. Dozens of new applications are appearing daily, with over 3,500 as of September 2 . Some of these are reasonably straightforward, easy to use, and cause few operational problems. Others are more ambitious, in scope, consequence, and operation, and lead to various problems not properly foreseen by the programmers. In different software evolution environments such applications products and products would not be set loose on the market without more extensive testing, but Facebook allows applications to go public without such testing. There are inbuilt methods of speedy communication between the users of each application and its programmers and maintainers, though. Facebook offers no guarantee that these applications will work properly. Facebook Markup Language Facebook Markup Language is a subset of HTML . It allows Facebook application writers to customise the "look and feel" of their applications, to a limited extent. Facebook Video During the time that Facebook released its platform, it also released an application http://mashable.com/2007/05/24/facebook-video-launches/ of its own for sharing videos on Facebook. Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. Additionally, users can "tag" their friends in videos they add much like they way users can tag their friends in photos. This feature was expected to increase competition with Userscript was posted on Userscripts.org which allows both the downloading of Facebook Videos and the embedding http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/08 /embed-facebook-videos-on-the-net/ of Videos on sites outside of Facebook's website. SALE RUMORS In 2006, with the sale of social networking site MySpace to NewsCorp , rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, has said that he does not want to sell the company and denies rumors to the contrary.30 He has already rejected outright offers in the range of $975 million, and it is not clear who might be willing to pay a higher premium for the site. Steve Rosenbush, a technology Business Analyst , suspects Viacom .31 |
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