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Facebook is a social networking site founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. It started as a college networking site and expanded to include anyone. Users create a profile page, share photos, join groups, and become fans of people, organizations, TV shows, movies, and musicians. The site was redesigned in 2008 to make it easier to use. Facebook has seen tremendous growth and is the largest networking site, with users worldwide nearly double that of MySpace.
Facebook is a social networking website intended to connect friends, family, and co-workers. It is the largest of the networking sites, with MySpace ranking second. It started as a college networking website and has expanded to include anyone and everyone.
Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and was originally called thefacebook. It was quickly successful on campus and expanded beyond Harvard to other Ivy League schools. As the phenomenon grew in popularity, Zuckerberg enlisted two other students, Duston Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, to assist. Within months, thefacebook had grown into a national university networking website.
Zuckerberg and Moskovitz left Harvard to run Facebook full-time shortly after taking over the national site. In August 2005, Facebook was renamed Facebook and the domain was purchased for US$200,000 (USD). At the time, it was only available to schools, universities, organizations and companies within English-speaking countries, but it has since expanded to include anyone.
Users create a profile page that displays information about themselves to their friends and networks. Choosing to include a profile in a network means that anyone within that network can view the profile. Your profile typically includes the following: About, Status, Friends, Friends in other networks, Photos, Notes, Groups, and The Wall.
Users can search for friends and acquaintances by email address, school, college or simply by typing a name or location to search. When people become friends, they are able to see all of each other’s profiles, including contact information. Email notifications let users know when new friends have chosen to add them to their list or when someone has sent them a message within the system.
A popular feature of the site is the ability to share photographs uploaded from a phone, camera or hard drive. As with other private information, users have the option to allow only friends to see their photos or anyone else. There is an unlimited amount of storage space available, which is a big plus of Facebook’s photo sharing capabilities.
Groups can be created by users. These can include anything from elementary school connections to hobes to interests. Groups can be public and available to everyone, or private, which means that only invited guests can join and view discussions. Similarly, the Events feature allows friends to host parties, concerts, and other real-world get-togethers. Users can also become fans of everything from people, organizations, TV shows, movies, and musicians.
There are countless applications available to add to a profile. These range from a best friends list to movie compatibility with others and maps of places users have traveled to. These applications are created by individuals outside of Facebook who are known as Developers.
Site users can share news, videos and other files with friends. Most news and video websites have buttons that you can click to automatically share your story or video to a feed. The person sharing can make comments on the shared item for their friends to see.
Personal notes can also be written and shared with friends. When sharing an item, users can attach the item to their wall for all to see, or they can tag individual people they think would be most interested in seeing the item. When a user is tagged, he receives an email notification.
The site was redesigned in late 2008, with the aim of streamlining the website and making it easier to see what friends were up to. It has seen tremendous growth since its inception and is poised to maintain its dominance in social networking. In early 2009, Facebook’s users worldwide were nearly double that of its old competitor MySpace.
