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 by
Mark 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.
Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a
personal profile, add other users as
friends,
and
In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and
Jim Breyer[13] added $1 million of his own money to the pot. A January 2009
Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.
[14] Entertainment Weekly
included 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?"
[15] 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.
[16] 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 May 2013.
[17]
messages, inc
Pre-IPO
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"
[18][19]
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.
[18][20]
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.
[21] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an
art history final, by uploading 500
Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.
[20] 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 about the Facemash incident.
[22] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
[23]
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.
[24] The three complained to the
Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.
[25] The agreed settlement was for 1.2m shares which were worth $300m at Facebook's IPO.
[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 Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help
promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford,
Columbia, and Yale.
[28] 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.
[29][30]
In mid-2004, 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] It 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]
luding 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] of which 8.7% are fake.
[11] 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.
[12]
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.
[44] At that time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.
[45] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including
Apple Inc. and
Microsoft.
[46] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid
email address.
[47][48]
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.
[49]
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.
[50] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.
[51] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in
Dublin, Ireland.
[52] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.
[53]In November 2010, based on
SecondMarket 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.
[54]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.
[55]
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.
[56]
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former
Sun Microsystems campus in
Menlo Park, California.
[57][58]
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.
[59]
According to the Nielsen Media Research study, released in December
2011, Facebook is the second most accessed website in the US (behind
Google).
[60]
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.
[61]
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.
[62]
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