Facebook is an online social networking service, whose name
stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the
academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help
students get to know each other.[7] It was founded in February 2004 byMark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, 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 eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook now allows
any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become
registered users of the site.[9]
Users must register before using the site, after which they may create
a personal profile,
add other users as friends, and exchange
messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile.
Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by
workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their
friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close
Friends". As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion
active users.[10] According to a May 2011 Consumer Reports survey, there are 7.5 million children under
13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site's terms of service.[11]
In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook,
and Jim Breyer[12] added $1 million of his own money to the pot.
A January 2009Compete.com study
ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly
active users.[13] Entertainment Weeklyincluded
the site 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?"[14] Facebook eventually filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012, and was headquartered in Menlo Park, California.[2] Facebook Inc. began selling stock to the
public and trading on the NASDAQ on May 18, 2012.[15]Based on its
2012 income of USD 5.1 Billion, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 list for the first time, being placed at
position of 462 on the list published in the May of 2013.
History
Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the
predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable
to Hot or Not, and "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"[17][18]
To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of
Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a
student "facebook" (a
directory with photos and basic information), though individual houses had been
issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s. Facemash attracted 450
visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.[17][19]
The site was quickly forwarded to several
campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard
administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the
administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the
charges were dropped.[20] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project
that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustanimages to a website, with one image per page along
with a comment section.[19] 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 Crimsonabout the Facemash
incident.[21] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched
"Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[22]
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.[23] The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began
an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg,
subsequently settling.[24] The agreed settlement was for 1.2m shares
which were worth $300m at Facebook's IPO.[25]
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.[26] 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.[27] It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT,
and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[28][29]
In mid-2004, entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg,
became the company's president.[30] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of
operations to Palo Alto, California.[27] It received its first investment later that
month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[31] The company dropped The from its name after
purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[32]
Facebook launched a high-school version in
September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[43] At that time, high-school networks required
an invitation to join.[44] Facebook later expanded membership
eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[45] Facebook was then opened on September 26,
2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.[46][47]
Late in 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business
pages, allowing companies to attract potential customers and tell about
themselves. These started as group pages, but a new concept called company
pages was planned.[48]
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.[49] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place
international ads on Facebook.[50] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it
would set up its international headquarters in Dublin,
Ireland.[51]In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned
cash-flow positive for the first time.[52] In November 2010, based onSecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares of privately
held companies, Facebook's value was $41 billion (slightly surpassing eBay's)
and it became the third largest U.S. Web company after Google and Amazon.[53]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after
2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13,
2010.[54]
In March 2011, it was reported that Facebook
removes approximately 20,000 profiles from the site every day for various
infractions, including spam, inappropriate content and underage use, as part of
its efforts to boost cyber security.[55]
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to
move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.[56][57]
Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion page views in the month of June 2011, making
it the most visited website of those tracked by DoubleClick.[58]
According to the Nielsen Media Research
study, released in December 2011, Facebook is the second most accessed website
in the US (behind Google).[59]
In March 2012, Facebook announced App Center,
an online mobile store which sells applications that connect to Facebook. The
store will be available to iPhone, Android and mobile web users.[60]
Facebook, Inc. held an initial public offering on May 17, 2012,
negotiating a share price of $38 apiece, valuing the company at $104 billion,
the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.[61]
On August 23, 2012, Facebook released the
much anticipated update to its iOS app, version 5.0. The app, which did not
receive positive sentiments from its users, was rebuilt from the ground up; the
app no longer uses page views which made it slow in the past but now utilizes code
that uses native elements of iOS.[63]
On January 15, 2013, Facebook announced their
new product Graph Search, which provides users with
a “precise answer” rather than a link to an answer by leveraging the data
already present on its site.[64] Facebook emphasized that the feature would be
"privacy-aware," returning only results from content already shared
with the user.[65]
The company is subject of a lawsuit by
Rembrandt Social Media which is also suing AddThis for the use of patents belonging to deceased
Dutch Programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer which involve the
"Like" button.[66]
On April 3, 2013, Facebook unveiled Home, a user interface layer for Android devices offering
heavy integration with the service, for an initial release on April 12, 2013. HTC also announced a newsmartphone with Home pre-loaded, the HTC First.[67]
On April 15, 2013 Facebook teamed up the
Attorneys General, announcing it's alliance with the National Association of
Attorneys General to help provide teens and parents more information on tools
that can help manage profiles on Facebook. The partnership between Facebook and
the Attorneys General will take place in 19 states.[68]
On April 19, 2013 Facebook officially updated
their logo. Facebook's new logo no longer includes the faint blue line at the
bottom of their "F" icon. The letter is also pulled closer to the
edge of the box.
Criticism
Facebook has met with controversies.
It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's
Republic of China,[220] Iran,[221] Uzbekistan,[222] Pakistan,[223] Syria(unblocked in Syria[224]),[225] and Bangladesh[citation needed] on different bases. For
example, it was banned in many countries of the world on the basis of allowed
content judged as anti-Islamic and containing religious discrimination. It has
also been banned at many workplaces to prevent employees from using it during
work hours.[226] 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.[227] In May 2011 emails were sent to journalists
and bloggers making critical allegations about Google's privacy
policies; however it was later discovered that the anti-Google
campaign, conducted by PR giant Burson-Marsteller, was paid for by Facebook in what CNN
referred to as "a new level skullduggery" and which Daily Beast
called a "clumsy smear".[228]
In July 2011, German authorities began to
discuss the prohibition of events organized on Facebook. The decision is based
on several cases of overcrowding by people not originally invited.[229][230] In one instance, 1,600 "guests"
attended the 16th birthday party for a Hamburg girl who accidentally posted the
invitation for the event as public. After reports of overcrowding, more than a
hundred police were deployed for crowd control. A policeman was injured and
eleven participants were arrested for assault, property damage and resistance
to authorities.[231] In another unexpectedly overcrowded event, 41
young people were arrested and at least 16 injured.[232]
In 2007, it was reported that 43% of British
office workers were blocked from accessing Facebook at work, due to concerns
including reduced productivity and the potential for industrial espionage.[233]
A 2011 study in the online journal First Monday, "Why Parents Help
Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act," examines how parents
consistently enable children as young as 10 years old to sign up for accounts,
directly violating Facebook's policy banning young visitors. This policy
technically allows Facebook to avoid conflicts with a United States federal
law, the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires
minors aged 13 or younger to gain explicit parental consent to access
commercial websites. Of the more than 1,000 households surveyed for the study,
more than three-quarters (76%) of parents reported that their child joined Facebook
when she was younger than 13, the minimum age in the site's terms of service.
The study notes that, in response to widespread reports of underage users, a
Facebook executive has said that "Facebook removes 20,000 people a day,
people who are underage." The study's authors also note, "Indeed,
Facebook takes various measures both to restrict access to children and delete
their accounts if they join." The findings of the study raise questions
primarily about the shortcomings of United States federal law, but also
implicitly continue to raise questions about whether or not Facebook does
enough to publicize its terms of service with respect to minors. Only 53% of
parents said they were aware that Facebook has a minimum signup age; 35% of
these parents believe that the minimum age is a site recommendation (not a
condition of site use), or thought the signup age was 16 or 18, and not 13.[234]
In November 2011, several Facebook users reported
that their accounts were hacked and their profile pictures were replaced with
pornographic images. For more than a week, users' news feeds were spammed with
pornographic, violent and sexual contents. It has been reported that more than
200,000 accounts in Bangalore, India were hacked. Facebook has denied the claims,
citing that "safety of the users was on the top of their priority
list".[235][236]
A 2013 study in the journal CyberPsychology,
Behavior, and Social Networking, "Who Commits Virtual Identity Suicide?
Differences in Privacy Concerns, Internet Addiction, and Personality Between
Facebook Users and Quitters" points to the fact that there is a rising
number of Facebook users who are discontent with Facebook and finally decide to
quit Facebook. The number one reason for users to quit Facebook was privacy
concerns (48%), being followed by a general dissatisfaction with Facebook
(14%), negative aspects regarding Facebook friends (13%) and the feeling of
getting addicted to Facebook (6%). Facebook quitters were found to be more
concerned about privacy, more addicted to the Internet and more conscientious.
Impact
Media impact
In April 2011, Facebook launched a new portal for marketers and
creative agencies to help them develop brand promotions on Facebook.[237] The
company began its push by inviting a select group of British advertising
leaders to meet Facebook's top executives at an "influencers' summit"
in February 2010. Facebook has now been involved in campaigns for True Blood, American Idol, and Top Gear.[238] News
and media outlets such as the Washington Post,[239] Financial Times[240] and ABC News[241] have used aggregated Facebook fan data
to create various infographics and charts to accompany their articles. In 2012,
the beauty pageant Miss Sri Lanka
Online was run
exclusively using Facebook.[242]
Social impact
Facebook has affected the social
life and activity of people in various ways. With its availability on many
mobile devices, Facebook allows users to continuously stay in touch with
friends, relatives and other acquaintances wherever they are in the world, as
long as there is access to the Internet. It can also unite people with common
interests and/or beliefs through groups and other pages, and has been known to
reunite lost family members and friends because of the widespread reach of its
network. One such reunion was between John Watson and the daughter he had been
seeking for 20 years. They met after Watson found her Facebook profile.[243] Another
father–daughter reunion was between Tony Macnauton and Frances Simpson, who had
not seen each other for nearly 48 years.[244]
Some argue that Facebook is beneficial to one's social life
because they can continuously stay in contact with their friends and relatives,
while others say that it can cause increased antisocial tendencies because
people are not directly communicating with each other. Some studies have named
Facebook as a source of problems in relationships. Several news stories have
suggested that using Facebook can lead to higher instances of divorce and infidelity, but the claims have been
questioned by other commentators.[245][246]
Political impact
Facebook's role in the American political process was demonstrated
in January 2008, shortly before the New Hampshire
primary, when Facebook teamed up with ABC and Saint Anselm College to allow users to give live feedback
about the "back to back" January 5 Republican and Democratic debates.[247][248][249] Charles Gibson moderated both debates, held at the
Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College. Facebook users took
part in debate groups organized around specific topics, register to vote, and
message questions.[250]
ABCNews.com reported in 2012 that the Facebook fanbases of
political candidates have relevance for the election campaign, including:
·
Allows politicians and campaign organizers to understand the
interests and demographics of their Facebook fanbases, as with Wisdom
for Facebook, to better target their voters.
·
Provides a means for voters to keep up-to-date on candidates'
activities, such as connecting to the candidates' Facebook Fan Pages.
Over a
million people installed the Facebook application "US Politics on
Facebook" in order to take part, and the application measured users'
responses to specific comments made by the debating candidates.[252] This
debate showed the broader community what many young students had already
experienced: Facebook as a popular and powerful new way to interact and voice
opinions. An article 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.[253]
In February 2008, a Facebook group called "One Million Voices
Against FARC" organized an event in which hundreds of thousands of
Colombians marched in protest against the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC (from the group's
Spanish name).[254] In August 2010, one of North Korea's
official government websites and the official news agency of the country, Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook.[255]
In 2011 there was a controversial ruling by French government to
uphold a 1992 decree which stipulates that commercial enterprises should not be
promoted on news programs. President Nicolas Sarkozy's colleagues have agreed
that it will enforce a law so that the word "Facebook" will not be
allowed to be spoken on the television or on the radio.[256]
In 2011, Facebook filed paperwork with the Federal Election
Commission to form a political action
committee under the
name FB PAC.[257] In
an email to The Hill,
a spokesman for Facebook said "FB PAC will give our employees a way to
make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who
share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while
giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."[258]
In popular culture
·
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.[259]
·
The Social
Network, a drama film directed by David Fincher about the founding of Facebook, was
released October 1, 2010.[260] Mark Zuckerberg has said that The Social Network is inaccurate.[261]
·
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.[262]
·
"You Have 0
Friends", an April 2010 episode of the American animated comedy
series, South Park, explicitly parodied Facebook.[263]
·
At age 102, Ivy
Bean of Bradford,
England joined Facebook in 2008, making her one of the oldest people ever on
Facebook.[264][265] At the time of her death in July 2010,
she had 4,962 friends on Facebook and more than 56,000 followers on Twitter.[266]
·
On May 16, 2011, an Israeli couple named their daughter after the
Facebook "like" feature.[267][268]
·
Major competitors of Facebook are qzone(qq.com)
and renren in China and South Korea; VK (social
network) and Odnoklassniki in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova,Ukraine, Uzbekistan; Draugiem.lv in Latvia; Cloob in Iran;
Zing in Vietnam; mixi in Japan.
