Facebook
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the website and its owner Facebook, Inc. For the photographic directory, see
face book.
Facebook is an online
social networking service. Its name stems from the
colloquial name for the book
given to students at the start of the academic year by some American
university administrations to help students get to know each other.
[7] Facebook 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.
[9]
Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a
personal profile, add other users as
friends,
exchange messages, and receive 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 (as of 2012) has about 180
petabytes of data a year and grows by over half a petabyte every 24 hours.
[13]
In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and
Jim Breyer[14] 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.
[15] 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?"
[16] 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.
[17] Based on its 2012 revenue 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.
[18]
History
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"
[19][20]
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.
[19][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 faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with
breach of security, violating
copyrights, and violating individual privacy. 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 images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.
[21] 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.
[23] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
[24]
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, subsequently settling.
[26] The agreed settlement was for 1.2m shares which were worth $300m at Facebook's IPO.
[27]
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.
[28] 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.
[29] 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.
[30][31]
In mid-2004, entrepreneur
Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.
[32] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to
Palo Alto, California.
[29] It received its first investment later that month from
PayPal co-founder
Peter Thiel.
[33] The company dropped
The from its name after purchasing the
domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.
[34]
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.
[35] At that time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.
[36] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including
Apple Inc. and
Microsoft.
[37] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid
email address.
[38][39]
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.
[40]
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.
[41] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.
[42] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in
Dublin, Ireland.
[43] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.
[44] 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.
[45]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.
[46]
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.
[47]
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former
Sun Microsystems campus in
Menlo Park, California.
[48][49]
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.
[50]
According to the Nielsen Media Research study, released in December
2011, Facebook is the second most accessed website in the US (behind
Google).
[51]
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.
[52]
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.
[53]
Initial public offering
Main article:
Facebook IPO
Facebook filed their S1 document with the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on February 1, 2012. The company filed for a
US$5 billion
initial public offering (IPO), making it one of the biggest in tech history and the biggest in Internet history.
[54]
Facebook valued its stock at $38 a share, pricing the company at $104
billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly public company.
[55] [56] The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history.
[57][58]
The shares began to be traded on May 18, and though the stock struggled
to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, it set a new record
for trading volume of an IPO, 460 million shares.
[59] The first day of trading was marred by numerous technical glitches that prevented orders from going through.
[60]
Only the aforementioned technical glitches and artificial support from
underwriters prevented the stock price from falling below the IPO price
on the first day of trading.
[61]
Later, it was revealed that Facebook's lead underwriters,
Morgan Stanley (MS),
JP Morgan (JPM), and
Goldman Sachs (GS) all cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow.
[62] The stock continued its freefall in subsequent days, closing at 34.03 on May 21 and 31.00 on May 22. A
'circuit breaker' was used in an attempt to slow down the decline in the stock price.
[63] Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Mary Schapiro and
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Chairman Rick Ketchum called for a review of the circumstances surrounding its troubled initial public offering.
[64]
Facebooks' IPO is now under investigation and has been compared to
pump and dump schemes.
[60][62][64][65] In the meantime, a class-action lawsuit is in the works due to the trading glitches, which led to botched orders.
[66][67]
Apparently, the glitches prevented a number of investors from selling
the stock during the first day of trading while the stock price was
falling - forcing them to incur bigger losses when their trades finally
went through.
Additional lawsuits have been filed due to allegations that an
underwriter for Morgan Stanley selectively revealed adjusted earnings
estimates to preferred clients.
[68] The remaining underwriters (MS, JPM, GS) and Facebook's CEO and board are also facing litigation.
[69]
It is believed that adjustments to earnings estimates were communicated
to the underwriters by a Facebook financial officer, who in turn used
the information to cash out on their positions while leaving the general
public with overpriced shares.
[70]
By the end of May 2012, the stock lost over a quarter of its starting value, which led to the
Wall Street Journal calling the IPO a "fiasco."
[71]
After IPO
In July 2012, Facebook added a
gay marriage icon to its timeline feature.
[72]
On August 23, 2012, Facebook released an update to its iOS app, version
5.0. The app changed how data was collected and displayed to make the
app faster. On January 15, 2013, Facebook announced its 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.
[73]
Facebook emphasized that the feature would be "privacy-aware,"
returning only results from content already shared with the user.
[74] The company is the subject of a lawsuit by Rembrandt Social Media for the use of patents involving the "Like" button.
[75] On April 3, 2013, Facebook unveiled
Home, a user-interface layer for Android devices offering greater integration with the service.
HTC announced a
smartphone with Home pre-loaded, the
HTC First.
[76]
On April 15, 2013, Facebook announced an alliance with the National
Association of Attorneys General to provide teens and parents with
information on tools that to manage Facebook profiles. The partnership
spanned 19 states.
[77]
On April 19, 2013, Facebook officially modified its logo to remove the
faint blue line at the bottom of the "F" icon. The letter "F" moved
closer to the edge of the box.
[78]
Following a campaign uniting 100 advocacy groups, Facebook agreed to
update its policy on hate speech. The campaign highlighted content
promoting domestic and sexual violence against women, and used over
57,000 tweets and more than 4,900 emails to create outcomes such as the
withdrawal of advertising from Facebook by 15 companies, including
Nissan UK, House of Burlesque and Nationwide UK. The social media
website initially responded by stating that "While it may be vulgar and
offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our
policies.",
[79]
but agreed on May 29, 2013 to take action after it had "become clear
that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work
as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of
gender-based hate."
[80]
On June 12, 2013, Facebook officially announced on its newsroom that
it was introducing clickable hashtags to help users follow trending
discussions or search what others are talking about on a particular
topic.
[81] A July 2013
Wall Street Journal article identified the Facebook IPO as the cause of a change in the U.S.' national economic statistics, as the company home,
San Mateo County,
California, became the top wage-earning county in the country after the
fourth quarter of 2012. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that
the average weekly wage in the county was
US$3,240,
107% higher than the previous year: "That's the equivalent of $168,000 a
year, and more than more than 50% higher than the next highest county,
New York County (better known as Manhattan), which came in at $2,107 a
week, or roughly $110,000 a year."
[82]
Russian internet firm Mail.Ru sold its remaining Facebook shares for
US$525 million on September 5, 2013, following its initial US$200
million investment in 2009. Partly owned by Russia's richest man
Alisher Usmanovhe, the firm owned a total of 14.2 million remaining shares prior to the sale.
[83]
-
-
Facebook on the Ad-tech 2010
-
Billboard on the
Thomson Reuters building welcomes Facebook to Nasdaq, 2012.
Corporate affairs
Management
The ownership percentages of the company, as of 2012, are: Mark Zuckerberg: 28%,
[84] Accel Partners: 10%,
Digital Sky Technologies: 10%,
[85] Dustin Moskovitz: 6%,
Eduardo Saverin: 5%,
Sean Parker: 4%,
Peter Thiel: 3%,
Greylock Partners and
Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each,
Microsoft: 1.3%,
Li Ka-shing: 0.8%, the
Interpublic Group: less than 0.5%. A small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including
Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild,
Adam D'Angelo, Chris Hughes, and
Owen Van Natta, while
Reid Hoffman and
Mark Pincus
have sizable holdings of the company. The remaining 30% or so are owned
by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside
investors.
[86] Adam D'Angelo,
former chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in
May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and
that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.
[87]
Key management personnel comprise
Chris Cox (VP of Product),
Sheryl Sandberg (COO), and Mark Zuckerberg (Chairman and CEO). As of April 2011, Facebook has over 2,000 employees, and offices in 15 countries.
[88] Other managers include chief financial officer David Ebersman and public relations head
Elliot Schrage.
[89]
Revenue
Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising.
[90][91]
Revenues
(estimated, in millions US$)
2006 |
$52[92] |
— |
2007 |
$150[93] |
188% |
2008 |
$280[94] |
87% |
2009 |
$775[95] |
177% |
2010 |
$2,000[96] |
158% |
2011 |
$4,270[97] |
114% |
Facebook generally has a lower
clickthrough rate
(CTR) for advertisements than most major Web sites. According to
BusinessWeek.com, banner advertisements on Facebook have generally
received one-fifth the number of clicks compared to those on the Web as a
whole,
[98] although specific comparisons can reveal a much larger disparity. For example, while
Google
users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of
8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),
[99] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).
[100]
Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, reports that successful
advertising campaigns on the site can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.
[101] By comparison, the CTR for competing social network
MySpace
is about 0.1%, about 2.5 times better than Facebook's rate but still
low compared to many other Web sites. The cause of Facebook's low CTR
has been attributed to younger users enabling
ad blocking
software and being better at ignoring advertising messages, as well as
the site being used more for the purpose of social communication as
opposed to viewing content.
[102]
On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.
[103]
A study found that, for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of
users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry
average was 25% for in-banner video ads.
[104]
Mergers and acquisitions
On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced it had acquired the domain name fb.com from the
American Farm Bureau Federation
for an undisclosed amount. On January 11, 2011, the Farm Bureau
disclosed $8.5 million in "domain sales income", making the acquisition
of FB.com one of the ten highest domain sales in history.
[105]
Offices
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in
Menlo Park,
California.
All users outside of the US and Canada have a contract with
Facebook's Irish subsidiary "Facebook Ireland Limited". This allows
Facebook to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia,
Africa and South America. Facebook is making use of the
Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay just about 2-3% corporation tax on all international revenue.
[106]
In 2010, Facebook opened its fourth office, in
Hyderabad[107][108][109] and the first in
Asia.
[110]
Facebook, which in 2010 had more than 750 million active users globally including over 23 million in India, announced that its
Hyderabad
centre would house online advertising and developer support teams and
provide round-the-clock, multi-lingual support to the social networking
site's users and advertisers globally.
[111] With this, Facebook joins other giants like
Google,
Microsoft,
Oracle,
Dell,
IBM and Computer Associates that have already set up shop.
[112] In Hyderabad, it is registered as 'Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd'.
[113][114][115]
Though Facebook did not specify its India investment or hiring
figures, it said recruitment had already begun for a director of
operations and other key positions at Hyderabad,
[116] which would supplement its operations in
California,
Dublin in
Ireland as well as at
Austin,
Texas.
A custom-built
data center with substantially reduced ("38% less")
power consumption compared to existing Facebook data centers opened in April 2011 in
Prineville, Oregon.
[117] In April 2012, Facebook opened a second data center in
Forest City, North Carolina, US.
[118]
On October 1, 2012, CEO Zuckerberg visited Moscow to stimulate social
media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook’s position in the
Russian market.
[119]
Russia's communications minister tweeted that Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev urged the social media giant's founder to abandon plans to lure
away Russian programmers and instead consider opening a research center
in Moscow. Facebook has roughly 9 million users in Russia, while
domestic analogue VK has around 34 million.
[120]
The functioning of a woodwork facility on the Menlo Park campus was
announced at the end of August 2013. The facility, opened in June 2013,
provides equipment, safety courses and woodwork learning course, while
employees are required to purchase materials at the in-house store. A
Facebook spokesperson explained that the intention of the facility is to
encourage employees to think in an innovative manner due to the
different environment, and also serves as an attractive perk for
prospective employees.
[121]
Open source contributions
Facebook is both a consumer of and contributor to
free and open source software.
[122] Facebook's contributions include:
HipHop for PHP,
[123] Fair scheduler in
Apache Hadoop,
[124] Apache Hive,
Apache Cassandra,
[125] and the
Open Compute Project.
[126]
Facebook also contributes to other opensource projects such as
Oracle's
MySQL database engine.
[127][128]
Website
Profile shown on Thefacebook in 2005
User profile
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests,
contact information, and other personal information. Users can
communicate with friends and other users through private or public
messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest
groups and "like pages" (called "fan pages" until April 19, 2010), some
of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.
[129] Facebook has been prompted to add a "
third gender", "other", or "
intersex" tab in the gender option which contains only male and female.
[130] Facebook refused and said that individuals can "opt out of showing their sex on their profile".
[131]
A 2012 Pew Internet and American Life study identified that between
20–30% of Facebook users are "power users" who frequently link, poke,
post and tag themselves and others.
[132]
The user page is set up in a minimal fashion with blue as the main
color. This was done because Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind.
[133]
On June 13, 2009, Facebook introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can be linked with simpler
URLs such as
http://www.facebook.com/facebook
instead of
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728
.
[134] Many new
smartphones
offer access to Facebook services through either their Web browsers or
applications. An official Facebook application is available for the
operating systems
Android,
iOS, and
webOS.
Nokia and
Research In Motion
both provide Facebook applications for their own mobile devices. More
than 425 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices
across 200 mobile operators in 60 countries.
[135]
Comparison with Myspace
The media often compares Facebook to
Myspace, but one significant difference between the two Web sites is the level of customization.
[136] Another difference is Facebook's requirement that users give their true identity, a demand that MySpace does not make.
[137] MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using
HTML and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook allows only
plain text.
[138] Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact. They include the
Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see;
[139] Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked);
[140] Photos, where users can upload albums and photos;
[141] and
Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions.
[142]
Depending on privacy settings, anyone who can see a user's profile can
also view that user's Wall. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users
to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited
to textual content only.
[139]
News Feed
On September 6, 2006, a
News Feed
was announced, which appears on every user's homepage and highlights
information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of
the user's friends.
[143]
This enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by
creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract
attention to their profile or cause.
[144]
Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users;
some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information,
others were concerned that it made it too easy for others to track
individual activities (such as relationship status changes, events, and
conversations with other users).
[145]
In response, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to
include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users
have been able to control what types of information are shared
automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent user-set
categories of friends from seeing updates about certain types of
activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added
friends.
[146]
On February 23, 2010, Facebook was granted a patent
[147]
on certain aspects of its News Feed. The patent covers News Feeds in
which links are provided so that one user can participate in the same
activity of another user.
[148]
The patent may encourage Facebook to pursue action against websites
that violate its patent, which may potentially include websites such as
Twitter.
[149]
One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the
Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos.
[150] Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other
image hosting services such as
Photobucket and
Flickr,
which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to
upload. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos
per album. As of May 2009, this limit has been increased to 200 photos
per album.
[151][152][153][154]
Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the
groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an
album can be set so that only the user's friends can see the album,
while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users
can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to
"
tag",
or label, users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's
friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a
notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them
a link to see the photo.
[155]
On June 7, 2012, Facebook launched its App Center to its users. It
will help the users in finding games and other applications with ease.
[156] Since the launch of the App Center, Facebook has seen 150M monthly users with 2.4 times the installation of apps.
[157]
The sorting and display of stories in a user's News Feed is governed by the algorithm
EdgeRank.
[158]
Facebook Notes
Facebook Notes was introduced on August 22, 2006, a blogging feature
that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import
blogs from
Xanga,
LiveJournal,
Blogger, and other blogging services.
[38] During the week of April 7, 2008, Facebook released a
Comet-based
[159] instant messaging application called "Chat" to several networks,
[160] which allows users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-based
instant messengers.
Facebook launched
Gifts
on February 8, 2007, which allows users to send virtual gifts to their
friends that appear on the recipient's profile. Gifts cost $1.00 each to
purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to each gift.
[161][162] On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched
Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads.
[163] Marketplace has been compared to
Craigslist by
CNET,
which points out that the major difference between the two is that
listings posted by a user on Marketplace are seen only by users in the
same network as that user, whereas listings posted on Craigslist can be
seen by anyone.
[164]
On July 20, 2008, Facebook introduced "Facebook Beta", a significant
redesign of its user interface on selected networks. The Mini-Feed and
Wall were consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections,
and an effort was made to create a "cleaner" look.
[165]
After initially giving users a choice to switch, Facebook began
migrating all users to the new version starting in September 2008.
[166] On December 11, 2008, it was announced that Facebook was testing a simpler signup process.
[167]
Messaging
A new Messaging platform, codenamed "Project Titan", was launched on November 15, 2010. Described as a "
Gmail
killer" by some publications, the system allows users to directly
communicate with each other via Facebook using several different methods
(including a special
email address,
text messaging, or through the Facebook website or mobile app)—no
matter what method is used to deliver a message, they are contained
within single
threads
in a unified inbox. As with other Facebook features, users can adjust
from whom they can receive messages from—including just friends, friends
of friends, or from anyone.
[168][169]
Aside from the Facebook website, Messages can also be accessed through the site's
mobile apps, or a dedicated
Facebook Messenger app,
[170]
Voice calls
Since April 2011, Facebook users have had the ability to make live
voice calls via Facebook Chat, allowing users to chat with others from
all over the world. This feature, which is provided free through
T-Mobile's new Bobsled service, lets the user add voice to the current
Facebook Chat as well as leave voice messages on Facebook.
[171]
Video calling
On July 6, 2011, Facebook launched its video calling services using
Skype as its technology partner. It allows one-to-one calling using a
Skype Rest API.
Following
On September 14, 2011, Facebook added the ability for users to
provide a "Subscribe" button on their page, which allows users to
subscribe to public postings by the user without needing to add them as a
friend.
[172]
In conjunction, Facebook also introduced a system in February 2012 to
verify the identity of certain accounts. Unlike a similar system used by
Twitter, verified accounts do not display a special verification badge,
but are given a higher priority in a user's "Subscription Suggestions".
[173]
In December 2012, Facebook announced that due to user confusion
surrounding its function, the Subscribe button would be re-labeled as a
"Follow" button—making it more similar to other social networks with
similar functions.
[174]
Privacy
To allay concerns about privacy, Facebook enables users to choose
their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of
their profile.
[175] The website is free to users, and generates revenue from advertising, such as
banner ads.
[176]
Facebook requires a user's name and profile picture (if applicable) to
be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information
they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through
their privacy settings.
[177]
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!.
[178] In 2010, the security team began expanding its efforts to reduce the risks to users'
privacy,
[179] but
privacy concerns remain.
[180] On November 6, 2007, Facebook launched
Facebook Beacon,
which was an ultimately failed attempt to advertise to friends of users
using the knowledge of what purchases friends made. As of March 2012,
Facebook's usage of its user data is under close scrutiny.
[181]
FTC settlement
On November 29, 2011, Facebook agreed to settle US
Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by failing to keep privacy promises.
[182]
Technical aspects
Facebook is built in
PHP which is compiled with
HipHop for PHP, a source code transformer built by Facebook engineers that turns PHP into
C++. The deployment of HipHop reportedly reduced average CPU consumption on Facebook servers by 50%.
[183]
Facebook is developed as one monolithic application. According to an
interview in 2012 with Chuck Rossi, a build engineer at Facebook,
Facebook compiles into a 1.5 GB binary blob which is then distributed to
the servers using a custom
BitTorrent-based
release system. Rossi stated that it takes approximately 15 minutes to
build and 15 minutes to release to the servers. The build and release
process is zero downtime and new changes to Facebook are rolled out
daily.
[183]
Facebook used a combination platform based on
HBase
to store data across distributed machines. Using a tailing
architecture, new events are stored in log files, and the logs are
tailed. The system rolls these events up and writes them into storage.
The User Interface then pulls the data out and displays it to users.
Facebook handles requests as
AJAX behavior. These requests are written to a log file using
Scribe (developed by Facebook).
[184]
Data is read from these log files using Ptail, an internally built
tool to aggregate data from multiple Scribe stores. It tails the log
files and pulls data out (thus the name). Ptail data is separated out
into three streams so they can eventually be sent to their own clusters
in different
data centers
(Plugin impression, News feed impressions, Actions (plugin + news
feed)). Puma is used to manage periods of high data flow (Input/Output
or IO). Data is processed in batches to lessen the amount of times
needed to read and write under high demand periods (A hot article will
generate a lot of impressions and news feed impressions which will cause
huge data skews). Batches are taken every 1.5 seconds, limited by
memory used when creating a
hash table.
[184]
After this, data is output in PHP format (compiled with
HipHop for PHP). The backend is written in
Java
and Thrift is used as the messaging format so PHP programs can query
Java services. Caching solutions are used to make the web pages display
more quickly. The more and longer data is cached the less realtime it
is. The data is then sent to
MapReduce
servers so it can be queried via Hive. This also serves as a backup
plan as the data can be recovered from Hive. Raw logs are removed after a
period of time.
[184]
Like button
The
like button
is a social networking feature, allowing users to express their
appreciation of content such as status updates, comments, photos, and
advertisements. It is also a
social plug-in of the Facebook Platform – launched on April 21, 2010
[185][186] – that enables participating Internet websites to display a similar like button.
Continuously liking any contents of one's friend will cause flooding
of notifications on his/her part and Facebook will display message to
the liker stating that (s)he must slow down; (s)he must wait for five
minutes in order for him/her to continue liking.
Lawsuit
Patents relating to the "Like" button and other social features held
by deceased Dutch programmer Joannes Jozef Everardus van Der Meer are
subject of a lawsuit brought against Facebook by Rembrandt Social Media.
[75][187]
Reception
According to
comScore,
Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique
visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008.
[188] ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 130 million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of 8.6 million people.
[189] According to
Alexa,
the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in
worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is
currently 2nd.
[190] Quantcast ranks the website 2nd in the U.S. in traffic,
[191] and
Compete.com ranks it 2nd in the U.S.
[192] The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 50 billion uploaded cumulatively.
[193] In 2010,
Sophos's
"Security Threat Report 2010" polled over 500 firms, 60% of which
responded that they believed that Facebook was the social network that
posed the biggest threat to security, well ahead of MySpace, Twitter,
and
LinkedIn.
[179]
Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several
English-speaking countries, including Canada,
[194] the United Kingdom,
[195] and the United States.
[196][197][198][199]
In regional Internet markets, Facebook penetration is highest in North
America (69 percent), followed by Middle East-Africa (67 percent), Latin
America (58 percent), Europe (57 percent), and Asia-Pacific (17
percent).
[200] Some of the top competitors were listed in 2007 by
Mashable.
[201]
The website has won awards such as placement into the "Top 100 Classic Websites" by
PC Magazine in 2007,
[202] and winning the "People's Voice Award" from the
Webby Awards in 2008.
[203] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a
New Jersey-based
company specializing in research concerning the college student market,
Facebook was named the second most popular thing among undergraduates,
tied with beer and only ranked lower than the
iPod.
[204]
On March 2010, Judge Richard Seeborg issued an order approving the class settlement in
Lane v. Facebook, Inc.,
[205] the class action lawsuit arising out of Facebook's Beacon program.
In 2010, Facebook won the
Crunchie "Best Overall Startup Or Product" for the third year in a row
[206] and was recognized as one of the "Hottest
Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.
[207] However, in a July 2010 survey performed by the
American Customer Satisfaction Index,
Facebook received a score of 64 out of 100, placing it in the bottom 5%
of all private-sector companies in terms of customer satisfaction,
alongside industries such as the
IRS e-file system, airlines, and
cable companies.
The reasons why Facebook scored so poorly include privacy problems,
frequent changes to the website's interface, the results returned by the
News Feed, and spam.
[208]
Total active users[N 1]
August 26, 2008 |
100[209] |
1,665 |
178.38% |
April 8, 2009 |
200[210] |
225 |
13.33% |
September 15, 2009 |
300[211] |
160 |
9.38% |
February 5, 2010 |
400[212] |
143 |
6.99% |
July 21, 2010 |
500[213] |
166 |
4.52% |
January 5, 2011 |
600[214][N 3] |
168 |
3.57% |
May 30, 2011 |
700[215] |
145 |
3.45% |
September 22, 2011 |
800[216] |
115 |
3.73% |
April 24, 2012 |
900[217] |
215 |
1.74% |
October 4, 2012 |
1,000[218] |
163 |
2.04% |
March 31, 2013 |
1,110[6] |
178 |
1.67% |
In December 2008, the
Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid
protocol to serve court notices to defendants. It is believed to be the world's first legal judgement that defines a
summons posted on Facebook as legally binding.
[219]
In March 2009, the New Zealand High Court associate justice David
Gendall allowed for the serving of legal papers on Craig Axe by the
company Axe Market Garden via Facebook.
[220][221] Employers (such as
Virgin Atlantic Airways)
have also used Facebook as a means to keep tabs on their employees and
have even been known to fire them over posts they have made.
[222]
By 2005, the use of Facebook had already become so ubiquitous that
the generic verb "facebooking" had come into use to describe the process
of browsing others' profiles or updating one's own.
[223] In 2008,
Collins English Dictionary declared "Facebook" as its new Word of the Year.
[224] In December 2009, the
New Oxford American Dictionary declared its word of the year to be the verb "
unfriend", defined as "To remove someone as a '
friend' on a
social networking site such as Facebook. As in, 'I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.'"
[225]
In early 2010,
Openbook was established, an avowed
parody (and privacy advocacy) website
[226] that enables text-based searches of those Wall posts that are available to "Everyone", i.e. to everyone on the Internet.
Writers for
The Wall Street Journal
found in 2010 that Facebook apps were transmitting identifying
information to "dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies".
The apps used an
HTTP referrer
which exposed the user's identity and sometimes their friends'.
Facebook said, "We have taken immediate action to disable all
applications that violate our terms".
[227]
In January 2013, the countries with the most Facebook users were:
[228]
- United States with 168.8 million members
- Brazil with 64.6 million members
- India with 62.6 million members
- Indonesia with 51.4 million members
- Mexico with 40.2 million members
All of the above total 309 million members or about 38.6 percent of Facebook's 1 billion worldwide members.
[229] As of March 2013, Facebook reported having 1.11 billion monthly active users, globally.
[230]
In regards to Facebook's mobile usage, per an analyst report in early
2013, there are 192 million Android users, 147 million iPhone users, 48
million iPad users and 56 million messenger users, and a total of 604
million mobile Facebook users.
[231]
-
Facebook popularity. Active users of Facebook increased from just a million in 2004 to over 750 million in 2011.
[232]
-
Registered Facebook users by age as of 2010.
Criticisms and controversies
- On August 19, 2013, Facebook's guest service treatment was widely decried. That day, it was reported that a Facebook user from Palestine Khalil Shreateh had found a bug
that allowed him to post material to other users' Facebook Walls. Users
aren't supposed to have the ability to post material to the Facebook
Walls of other users unless they're approved friends with those users
that they have posted material to. To prove that he was telling the
truth, Shreateh posted material to Sarah Goodin's wall, a friend of
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Following this, Shreateh contacted
Facebook's security team with the proof that his bug was real,
explaining in detail what was going on. Facebook has a bounty program in
which it compensates people a 500+ fee for reporting bugs instead of
using them to their advantage or selling them on the black market.
However, it was reported that instead of fixing the bug and paying
Shreateh the fee, Facebook originally told him that "this was not a bug"
and dismissed him. Shreateh then tried a second time to inform
Facebook, but they dismissed him yet again. On the third try, Shreateh
used the bug to post a message to Mark Zuckerbeg's Wall, stating "Sorry
for breaking your privacy ... but a couple of days ago, I found a
serious Facebook exploit" and that Facebook's security team wasn't
taking him seriously. Within minutes, a security engineer contacted
Shreateh, questioned him on how he performed the move and ultimately
acknowledged that it was a bug in the system. Facebook temporarily
suspended Shreateh's account and fixed the bug after several days.
However, in a move that was met with much public criticism and
disapproval, Facebook refused to pay out the 500+ fee to Shreateh;
instead, Facebook responded that by posting to Zuck's account, Shreateh
had violated one of their terms of service
policies and therefore "could not be paid." Included with this, the
Facebook team strongly censured Shreateh over his manner of resolving
the matter. In closing, they asked that Shreateh continue to help them
find bugs.[233][234][235]
-
- On August 22, 2013, Yahoo News reported that Marc Maiffret, a chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm BeyondTrust, is prompting hackers
to support in raising a $10,000 reward for Khalil Shreateh. On August
20, Maiffret stated that he had already raised $9,000 in his efforts,
including the $2,000 he himself contributed. He and other hackers alike
have denounced Facebook for refusing Shreateh compensation. Stated
Maiffret, "He is sitting there in Palestine doing this research on a
five-year-old laptop that looks like it is half broken. It's something
that might help him out in a big way." Facebook representatives have
since responded, "We will not change our practice of refusing to pay
rewards to researchers who have tested vulnerabilities against real
users." Facebook representatives also claimed they'd paid out over $1
million to individuals who have discovered bugs in the past.[236]
- On April 21, 2011, Greenpeace
released a report showing that of the top ten big brands in cloud
computing, Facebook relied the most on coal for electricity for its data
centers. At the time, data centers consumed up to 2% of all global
electricity and this amount was projected to increase. Phil Radford
of Greenpeace said “we are concerned that this new explosion in
electricity use could lock us into old, polluting energy sources instead
of the clean energy available today.”[237]
On Thursday, December 15th, 2011, Greenpeace and Facebook announced
together that Facebook would shift to use clean and renewable energy to
power its own operations. Marcy Scott Lynn, of Facebook’s sustainability
program, said it looked forward “to a day when our primary energy
sources are clean and renewable” and that the company is “working with
Greenpeace and others to help bring that day closer.”[238] [239]
- Facebook has met with controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's Republic of China,[240] Iran,[241] Uzbekistan,[242] Pakistan,[243] Syria (unblocked in Syria[244]),[245] 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.[246] 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.[247] 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".[248]
- 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.[249][250]
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.[251] In another unexpectedly overcrowded event, 41 young people were arrested and at least 16 injured.[252]
- 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.[253]
- 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.[254]
- In November 2011, several Facebook users in Bangalore,
India reported that their accounts had been 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, and it was reported that more than 200,000 accounts were
affected. Facebook described the reports as inaccurate, and Bangalore
police speculated that the stories may have been rumors spread by
Facebook's competitors.[255][256]
- 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.[180]
Impact
Media impact
In April 2011, Facebook launched a new portal for marketers and
creative agencies to help them develop brand promotions on Facebook.
[257]
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.
[258] News and media outlets such as the Washington Post,
[259] Financial Times
[260] and ABC News
[261]
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.
[262]
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.
[263]
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.
[264]
Another father–daughter reunion was between Tony Macnauton and Frances
Simpson, who had not seen each other for nearly 48 years.
[265]
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.
[266][267]
Facebook envy
Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone's face, you really have not acted.
“
”
Recent studies have shown that Facebook causes negative effects on
self-esteem
by triggering feelings of envy, with vacation and holiday photos
proving to be the largest resentment triggers. Other prevalent causes of
envy include posts by friends about family happiness and images of
physical beauty—such envious feelings leave people lonely and
dissatisfied with their own lives. A joint study by two German
universities discovered that one out of three people were more
dissatisfied with their lives after visiting Facebook, and another study
by
Utah Valley University found that college students felt worse about their own lives following an increase in the amount of time spent on Facebook.
[269][270][271]
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.
[272][273][274] 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.
[275]
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, 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.
[276]
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.
[277]
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).
[278] In August 2010, one of North Korea's official government websites and the official news agency of the country,
Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook.
[279]
A man during the 2011 Egyptian protests carrying a card saying "Facebook,#jan25, The Egyptian Social Network".
In January 2011, Facebook played a major role in generating the first spark for the
2011 Egyptian revolution.
[280][281]
On January 14, the Facebook page of "We are all khaled Said" was
started by Wael Ghoniem Create Event to invite the Egyptian people to
"peaceful demonstrations" on January 25. As in Tunisia, Facebook become
the primary tool for connecting all protesters, which lead the Egyptian
government of Prime Minister
Nazif to ban Facebook, Twitter and another websites on January 26
[282]
then ban all mobile and Internet connections for all of Egypt at
midnight January 28. After 18 days, the uprising forced President
Mubarak to resign.
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.
[283]
In 2011, Facebook filed paperwork with the
Federal Election Commission to form a
political action committee under the name
FB PAC.
[284] 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."
[285]
Unfriending psychological impact
Although Facebook has an upside of friending people, there is also
the downside of having someone unfriend or reject another person,
according to
psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne.
[286] Whitbourne refers to unfriended persons on Facebook as victims of
estrangement.
[287] Unfriending someone is seldom a mutual decision and the person often does not know of being unfriended.
[287]
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.[288]
- The Social Network, a drama film directed by David Fincher about the founding of Facebook, was released October 1, 2010.[289] Mark Zuckerberg has said that The Social Network is inaccurate.[290]
- 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.[291]
- "You Have 0 Friends", an April 2010 episode of the American animated comedy series, South Park, explicitly parodied Facebook.[292]
- At age 102, Ivy Bean of Bradford, England joined Facebook in 2008, making her one of the oldest people ever on Facebook.[293][294] At the time of her death in July 2010, she had 4,962 friends on Facebook and more than 56,000 followers on Twitter.[295]
- On May 16, 2011, an Israeli couple named their daughter after the Facebook "like" feature.[296][297]
- Major competitors of Facebook are qzone(qq.com) and renren in China; Cyworld in South Korea; VK and Odnoklassniki in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan; Draugiem.lv in Latvia; Cloob in Iran; Zing in Vietnam; mixi in Japan.[298]