Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University.[5] 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 later expanded further to include (potentially) any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.[6]
The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product produced by Zuckerberg's prep school Phillips Exeter Academy which for decades published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the "face book".
Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria,[7] China,[8] Vietnam,[9] and Iran.[10] It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.[11] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.[12] The site has also been involved in controversy over the sale of fans and friends.[13]
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[14] 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?"[15]
There have recently been reports of Facebook proposing an initial public offering (IPO), i.e. issue equity shares as stock to investors. However, Zuckerberg stresses that it will not be for a few more years, and the company is in no need of additional capital.[16][17] Also, some analysts fear the Facebook IPO might be a particularly weak one.
Thefacebook
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. "It is clear that the technology needed to create a centralized Website is readily available," the paper observed. "The benefits are many."[21] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[28] "Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson. "I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."[29] "When Mark finished the site, he told a couple of friends. And then one of them suggested putting it on the Kirkland House online mailing list, which was, like, three hundred people," according to roommate Dustin Moskovitz. "And, once they did that, several dozen people joined, and then they were telling people at the other houses. By the end of the night, we were, like, actively watching the registration process. Within twenty-four hours, we had somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants."[30]
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.[31] 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.[32] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[33] Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.[34] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[32] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[35]
Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[36] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.[37] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[38] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.[39][40] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[41]
