From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the website. For the collection of photographs of people, see Facebook (directory).
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| 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 (August 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 |
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Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] As of July 2010[6] which is about one person for every fourteen in the world.[7][N 1] Users 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. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website. Facebook has more than 500 million active users,[update]
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.
Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Pakistan,[9] Syria,[10] the People’s Republic of China,[11] Vietnam,[12], Iran[13], and North Korea. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.[14] Facebook’s privacy has also been an issue, and the safety of their users has been compromised several times. Facebook settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.[15] The site has also been involved in controversy over the sale of fans and friends.[16]
A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[17]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?”[18]
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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, according to the Harvard Crimson.[19]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.”[20] According to
Mark ZuckerbergHarvard dorm room. co-created Facebook in his
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 directory with photos and basic information, and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.[20] That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.[21]
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, but ultimately the charges were dropped.[22] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final by uploading 500 Augustan[21] images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section. 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[23] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com.[24] about the Facemash incident.
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.[25] The three complained to the Harvard Crimson and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, later settling.[26]
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.[27] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris HughesStanford, Columbia, and Yale.[28] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[29][30] soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to
Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president.[31] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[28] Facebook received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[32] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[33]
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