Gadget Mania

Facebook is a popular, free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University.[5] Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Ivy League. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 140 million active users worldwide.[6]

Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria[7] and Iran.[8] It has also been banned at many places of work to increase productivity.[9] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.
History

Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004[10] while attending Harvard University as a sophomore.[11] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[12]

Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service.[13] 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.[14] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League schools and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[15] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[14] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. [16]

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[17] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.[18] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[19] Facebook was then opened to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address on September 26, 2006.[20][21]

BusinessWeek has confirmed that Facebook, beginning in Autumn 2008, will allow its employees to sell stock at no more than a $3.75 billion valuation
Funding
Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California

Facebook received its first investment of US$500,000 in June 2004 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[23] This was followed a year later by $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then $27.5 million more from Greylock Partners.[23][24] A cash flow statement was leaked, showing that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million.[25] Microsoft approached Facebook in September 2007, proposing an investment in return for a 5% stake in the company. Microsoft would pay an estimated $300–500 million for the share.[26] Microsoft announced on October 24, 2007 that it purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $246 million.[27] On November 30, 2007, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook.[28]

BusinessWeek reported on March 28, 2006 that a potential acquisition of the website was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high as $2 billion.[29] With the sale of social networking website MySpace to News Corp on July 19, 2005, rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company.[30] Zuckerberg had already said he did not want to sell the company and denied rumors to the contrary.[31] In late September, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place concerning acquisition of the social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion.[32] Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic audience.[33] Other companies, including Google, expressed interest in September 2007 to buy a portion of Facebook.[34] Amid the rumors, Zuckerberg claimed that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, stating on July 17, 2007, "We're not really looking to sell the company. [...] We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."[35]
Website
Facebook's new homepage features a login form on the top right for existing users and a registration form directly underneath for new visitors.

Facebook users may choose to join one or more networks, organized by city, workplace, school, and region.[36] These networks help users connect with members of the same network. Users can also connect with friends, giving them access to their friends' profiles.[37]

The website is free to users, but generates revenue from advertising. This includes banner ads.[38] Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends.[39] The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends only when the appropriate Privacy settings have been altered. Without altering the Privacy settings a Facebook profile is viewable by anybody on Facebook.

Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising,[40] and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft but considerably less than Yahoo! when compared with other web companies.[41]

Features
News Feed

On 6 September 2006, Ruchi Sanghvi announced a new home page feature called News Feed.[1] Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile. The new layout, by contrast, created an alternate home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activity. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini-Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini-Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors.

Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused some discontent among Facebook users. Many users complained that the News Feed was too cluttered and full of undesired information. Others were concerned that the News Feed made it too easy for other people to track activities like changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users.[2] In response to this dissatisfaction, creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Thereafter, users were able to control what types of information were shared automatically with friends.[3] Currently, users may prevent friends from seeing updates about several types of especially private activities, although other events are not customizable in this way.

Facebook also provides the option for users to comment items in their Friends' News Feed. The largest number of comments is 100 on a user being marked as 'in a relationship' posted at 22.17, 07/01/2009 - the actual number of comments was slightly higher, somewhere between 110-120, but once the 100 mark was reached earlier comments were deleted from the feed and the participants stopped commenting in order to preserve the discussion. Other users joined in, however, and several of the original comments were lost. The closed nature of facebook (only Friends can see or comment on a users News Feed) makes it difficult to verify if it is in fact the highest.

Recently, Facebook allows users to minimize how often they see certain types of stories and certain friends in their News Feed.

Wall

The Wall is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see while displaying the time and date the message was written. 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 friends' 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,[4] whereas previously the wall was limited to text content only.

Photos

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums of photos, tag friends, and comment on photos. According to Facebook,[5] there are

* 1.7 billion user photos
* 2.2 billion friends tagged in user photos
* 160 terabytes of photo storage used with an extra 60 terabytes available
* 60+ million photos added each week which take up 5 terabytes of disk space
* 3+ billion photo images served to users every day
* 100,000+ images served per second during peak traffic windows

Gifts
Some of Facebook's gifts, as displayed in the website's gift shop.

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. None will see the giver's name, and the gift will go in the recipient's gift box but not the wall.

Facebook users are given one free gift to give upon account signup. 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 net proceeds (after credit card processing fees were taken out, etc.) 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.

On November 8, 2008, Facebook changed the $1.00 per gift model to a micro-payment model of 100 "points" per $1.00, with the existing gifts costing 100 "points". They plan to allow a wider variety of gifts in the future.

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 Allia,[6] 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 Other. Ads can be posted in either available or wanted format.[7] The market place is available for all Facebook users and is currently free.[8]

[edit] Pokes

Facebook includes a "poke" feature that allows one user to send a "poke" to another. According to Facebook's FAQ section on the Poke Feature, "a poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook. When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings." In principle, this is intended to be 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,[9] some users construe it as a sexual advance (which is hardly surprising, as "poke" has, for centuries, had the sexual meaning in colloquial English language). There are several applications such as "X Me" and "SuperPoke!" that allow users to put any action in place of the word "poke."

[edit] Status

Facebook has a micro-blogging feature called "status updates" which allows users to inform their friends of their current whereabouts, actions, or thoughts. For example "Billy visited Jen," "Sam called Jen," "Matt dated Jen," or "Jen is a total idiot." Facebook originally prompted the status update with "User name is..." and Facebook users filled in the rest. However, on December 13, 2007, the requirement to start a status update with "is" was removed. While "is" still appears by default, a user may backspace to delete it when entering a status update. [10]

Status updates are noted in the "Recently updated" section of a user's friend list. The three most updated statuses are shown in the top right of the news feed.

[edit] Events

Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings.[11] Events require an event name, tagline, network, host name, event type, start and end time, location & city, and a guest list of friends invited. Events can be open, closed, or secret. When setting up an event the user can choose to allow friends to upload photos, video, and posted items.

[edit] Networks and groups

Facebook allows different networks and groups to which many users can join. It also allows privacy settings on basis of networks. Groups are used for discussions and events etc. Groups are a way of enabling a number of people to come together online to share information and discuss specific subjects. They are increasingly used by clubs, companies and public sector organizations to engage with stakeholders - be they members of the public, employees, members, service users, shareholders or customers. A group is comprised of but not limited to the following: the members who have joined, recent news contents, discussion board contents, wall contents, photos, posted items, videos and all associated comments of such items.

[edit] Video

During the time that Facebook released its platform, it also released an application[12] 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 the way users can tag their friends in photos. Users also have the option of video messaging.

[edit] Chat

On April 5, 2008, Facebook pre-released Facebook Chat.[13][14] As of April 23, 2008, Facebook chat was released to the entire Facebook userbase. Users are only able to chat with their Facebook friends and on a one-to-one basis. Instant messaging clients that currently support facebook chat include Digsby, Adium, and Scrapboy, as well as Pidgin with a cross-platform plugin. Facebook Chat can also be run on the desktop using Gabtastik, a dedicated web chat browser. On May 13, 2008, a Facebook developer announced that they are working on XMPP support, allowing hundreds of instant messaging clients to interoperate with the service.[15]

[edit] Pages

Individuals or companies can create "pages" which allows users to "become a fan" of the individual, product, service, or concept. Pages are integrated with Facebook's advertising system, allowing Page owners to easily advertise to Facebook's users. Owners can send updates to their fans, which shows up on their news feeds. They also have access to insights and analytics of their fan base.[16]

[edit] Platform applications

On May 24, 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform,[17] which provides a framework for third party developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. Even games such as chess are available. As of January 31, 2008, there are more than 14,000 applications.[18]

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. On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm.[19]

On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed 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 the highly viral, yet useless applications.[20] Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a "cornucopia of uselessness."[21] Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook "user experience" is not degraded.[22][23]

Primarily attempting to create viral applications is a method that has certainly been employed by numerous Facebook application developers. Stanford University even offered a class in the Fall of 2007, entitled, Computer Science (CS) 377W: "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook". Numerous applications created by the class were highly successful, and ranked amongst the top Facebook applications, with some achieving over 3.5 million users in a month.[24]

[edit] APIs

Different APIs are available for a third party application including authorizing APIs. Facebook offers "API calls" to third party to access facebook information, and Facebook Query Language (FQL) functions to fetch data.[25] Other than fetching user data, APIs for access to facebook core features like notifications, invites, feeds and adding profile boxes available.

[edit] Facebook Markup Language

Facebook Markup Language ("FBML") is a variant-evolved subset of HTML with some elements removed. It allows Facebook Application developers to customise the "look and feel" of their applications, to a limited extent. It is the specification of how to encode content so that Facebook's servers can read and publish it, which is needed in the Facebook-specific feed so that Facebook's system can properly parse content and publish it as specified.[26] The FBML for a profile box is set by calling profile.setFBML through the API. The FBML is cached on Facebook's server until profile.setFBML is called again through a canvas page. The official FBML documentation is hosted on the Facebook Developers Wiki.
Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect was announced on 23 July 2008 at Facebook's annual conference for developers and made available to users in December 2008. A single sign-on service that competes with OpenID[29], the service enables Facebook users to login to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from such sites with their Facebook friends. Here is Facebook's own list of all the sites that have implemented Facebook Connect (partially only) with a full scale implementation of it at Brainfall.com