Facebook is a social networking website that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information. Launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, it has been made available to users with any email address, if they are within a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.
As of October 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites, with 43 million active members worldwide, with membership expected to surpass 60 million users by the end of the year (also from non-collegiate networks). As of mid-November, active membership is quoted at 54 million. From September 2006 to September 2007 it increased its ranking from 60th to 7th most visited web site, and was the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.
The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that some U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Operations
The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week). Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends. According to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students in [previously] supported colleges have a profile [on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60% log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month." According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, "People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook." In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited liability company specialising in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and losing only to the iPod.
Origins and Expansion
Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in February 2004, while attending Harvard University, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. At that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. The following month, Zuckerberg, McCollum and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California, to continue work on Facebook's development with additional help from Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker. In September, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners of the social networking website ConnectU, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally used source code intended for a website they asked him to build for them. Also at that time, Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December, Facebook's user base had exceeded one million.
2005
In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.8 million in venture capital from Accel Partners. On August 23, 2005, Facebook bought the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface Corporation for $200,000 and dropped "the" from its name. At that time the site was overhauled, a change intended to make profile pages more user-friendly, according to Zuckerberg. Also that month McCollum went back to Harvard although he continued to serve as a consultant and returned to work on staff during the summers. As before, Hughes remained in Cambridge while he performed his duties as company spokesperson. Then, on September 2, 2005, Zuckerberg launched the high school iteration of Facebook, calling it the next logical thing to do. While initially described as separate "communities" to which users needed to be invited to participate, within only fifteen days most high school networks did not require a password to join (although registration with Facebook was still necessary.) By October, Facebook's expansion had trickled down to most small universities and junior colleges in the United States, Canada, and the UK, in addition to having expanded to twenty-one universities in the United Kingdom, the entire Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) system in Mexico, the entire University of Puerto Rico network in Puerto Rico, and the whole University of the Virgin Islands network in the U.S. Virgin Islands. On December 11, 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to more than 2,000 colleges and more than 25,000 high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.
2006
On February 27, 2006, Facebook began allowing college students to add high school students as friends due to requests from users. About a month later, on March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a potential acquisition of the site was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million, and it was rumored that the asking price was as high as $2 billion. In April, Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners invested an additional $25 million in the site. In May, Facebook's network extended into India, at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The following month Facebook threatened to seek costs of up to $100,000 from Quizsender.com for copyright infringement for allegedly copying the "look and feel" of Facebook. On July 25, new services were offered in the site that would potentially produce additional revenue. A promotion was arranged between Facebook and iTunes, in which members of the Apple Students group would receive a free 25 song sampler each week until September 30 in various music genres. The promotion's purpose was to make students more familiar with and enthusiastic about each service as fall classes approached. In the early half of August, Facebook added universities in Germany and high schools in Israel, (Haifa, Jerusalem, and Qiryat Gat) to its network. On the 22nd of that month, Facebook introduced Facebook Notes, a blogging feature with tagging, embedded images, and other features, also allowing the importation of blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. This newly added feature also included the common blog feature of allowing readers to comment on users' entries. On September 11, 2006, Facebook became open to all users of the Internet, prompting protest from its existing user base. Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address.
2007
On May 10, 2007, Facebook announced a plan to add free classified advertisements to its website, making it a competitor with established online companies such as Craigslist. This feature, known as Facebook Marketplace, went live on May 14, 2007; Facebook launched an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as Facebook Platform. In June, the partnership begun the previous year between iTunes and Facebook continued, with the download service again offering free music samplers through the Apple Students group. In July, Facebook announced its first acquisition, purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. In August, the company was featured in a Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy in the magazine's annual college edition.
Facebook hired YouTube's former CFO Gideon Yu on July 24, 2007. Gideon Yu succeeded Michael Sheridan.
On September 25, 2007, it was rumored that Microsoft may buy a stake in Facebook. An outright sale of Facebook is said to be unlikely as founder Mark Zuckerberg would like to keep it independent.
On October 24, 2007, the Associated Press reported Microsoft had bought a 1.6% share of the company for $240 million.
On November 7, 2007, Facebook announced Facebook Ads; a marketing initiative which includes a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their Facebook friends (Facebook Beacon); the capability of businesses to host pages for various brands, products and services (Facebook Pages); a targeted ad serving program based on user and friend profile and activity data (Facebook Social Ads); and a service for providing businesses with advertisement analytic data including performance metrics (Facebook Insights). With respect to privacy, Facebook states that "no personally identifiable information is shared with an advertiser in creating a Social Ad," and that "Facebook users will only see Social Ads to the extent their friends are sharing information with them". Facebook Ads replaces the site's previous Facebook Flyers program.
SITE FEATURES
The Wall
The Wall is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. 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 friend's 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, whereas previously the wall was limited to textual content only.
Gifts
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 USD $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.
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, 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. The market place is available for all Facebook users and is currently free.
Pokes
Facebook includes a "poke" feature which 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 serve as 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, some users construe it as a sexual advance. This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group titled "Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex," which, as of October 2007, has more than 300,000 members.
Friends often engage in what is known as a "poke war," where the poke is exchanged back and forth continuously between two users by using the "poke back" feature.
There are several new applications such as "X Me" and "SuperPoke!", that allow users to put any action in place of the word "poke."
Status
The "status" feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions. Facebook prompts the status update with "(User name) is..." and Facebook users fill in the rest. Status updates are noted in the "Recently updated" section of a users' friend list.
Many students have protested the required "is" referring to people who speak languages other than English and legitimate sentences that cannot be changed to accommodate the "is" grammatically (e.g. "(User name) just got a haircut.").
Events
Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings.
Applications
On May 24, 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features.
Among the most popular applications are Top Friends, which allows users to select and display their favorite friends; Graffiti, which gives users a visual version of Facebook's wall; and iLike, a social music discovery service that features concert information and a music trivia game, similar to the one featured on the iPod. 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. Even games such as chess and Scrabble are available.
On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the "Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first Facebook-only venture capital firm. On July 10, 2007 Bay Partners announced appfactory, a venture capital seed program dedicated solely to Facebook applications.
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.
Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a "cornucopia of uselessness."
As of October 24, 2007, there are more than 6,500 applications.
Facebook Video
During the time that Facebook released its platform, it also released an application 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. This feature was expected to increase competition with MySpace. However, the Facebook Video Application does not allow sharing videos outside of Facebook. Users will not be able to export or download videos from Facebook. Despite this, a Greasemonkey Userscript was posted on Userscripts.org which allows both the downloading of Facebook Videos and the embedding of Videos on sites outside of Facebook's website.
Use in Investigations
The information students provide on Facebook has been used in investigations by colleges, universities, and local police. Facebook's Terms of Use specify that "the website is available for your personal, noncommercial use only", misleading some to believe that college administrators and police may not use the site for conducting investigations. However, there are settings on Facebook that allow a user to make his/her profile private (only people the user approves may see his/her profile).
Alcohol Policy Violation
There have been incidents where colleges and universities use Facebook to investigate underage drinking and violations of dry campus policies or discover them while investigating other incidents. For example, several Residence Community Advisors at Northern Kentucky University lost their jobs when pictures were discovered of them having drinks in a residence hall one night towards the end of semester. Many high schools have also begun to use Facebook to crack down on underage drinking and other illegal activities.
In response to the monitoring, some students have begun to submit "red herring" party listings. In one case at The George Washington University, shown at CakeParty.org, students advertised their party and were raided by campus police. The police found only cake, no alcohol, and later claimed the break up had been triggered by a noise complaint.
Other Investigations
* There have been several incidents where candidates in student government elections used Facebook for campaigning in a way that was not permitted by their campaign policies.
* At the University of Mississippi, a group of students were brought before the University's Judicial Board in April 2005 and forced to remove a Facebook group that professed their love for a professor in a sexually suggestive manner.
* One Miami University student was arrested after he set a composite sketch of a rape suspect as his profile picture.
* Others have been punished for rushing the football field at Penn State. (Many "I rushed the field" groups were created after the Nittany Lion football team defeated Ohio State in October 2005, and State College Police and Pennsylvania State Police used the groups to arrest those who they believed rushed the field in violation of school policy.)
* A Duquesne University student was punished for hate speech against homosexuals.
* Four Syracuse University students were reprimanded for harassing an instructor in a Facebook group and were threatened with expulsion, though the final result was academic probation. On the other hand, University of Louisville students who had created a Facebook group to complain about a professor's teaching shortcomings helped lead to the dismissal of their targeted instructor in February 2006, and the students were not punished.
* In February 2007, following the hit-and-run death of freshman Carlee Wines, University of Connecticut campus police used Facebook to link the suspected driver, Anthony P. Alvino of Lindenhurst, N.Y., to the university. By following leads via Facebook, police learned of the connection between Alvino and his girlfriend, Michele A. Hall, a UConn student. Alvino was charged for the hit-and-run, while Hall was charged with helping cover it up and hindering prosecution.
* In April 2007, just days after the Virginia Tech shooting, a student at the SUNY College at Cobleskill who was from Sri Lanka was remanded into psychiatric care and suspended from college after posting a photo of himself on his profile with a vaguely threatening message underneath. This story became even more controversial as it grew across the news.
* It has been reported that staff at the University of Oxford have been looking at students' Facebook pages in investigating poor behaviour. Staff have been searching through photos in an effort to root out poor conduct from students celebrating their exam results and graduation. The Oxford University Student Union has urged students to restrict access to 'friends only' in an effort to protect privacy.
* In July 2007 the University of Kent issued a strongly worded statement protesting that a group of students had created a hate page about a library employee, which the site quickly removed.
* In November 2006, two students were expelled from the University of Texas fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha based on racist images posted on Facebook.
* In October 2005, Facebook was used as a tool for police to look up Penn State University students who ran onto the field after a victory over Ohio State.
* Throughout the years, Facebook has been used by the Police to find people smoking Weed on Farrand Field in Boulder,CO.
Other Uses of Profile Information
Some employers look at Facebook profiles of prospective employees or interns. Information posted on Facebook is potentially accessible to employers with faculty or alumni accounts.
Information posted on the site is sometimes distributed publicly. Students who are related to politicians or other public figures have had screenshots of their profiles or photo albums taken and shared in an attempt to embarrass their relatives. After profile information was posted on Gawker and Wonkette, two popular weblogs, Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, sent the sites' publishers cease and desist notices. Also, a group calling itself Performing Politics, Inc. publicly displayed the profiles of students at Yale who had made comments about homosexuality in an effort to show evidence of homophobia at the school.
In Wrentham, Massachusetts, State Senator Scott P. Brown (R) was invited to speak at King Philip Regional High School to talk about his position against gay marriage. During the speech, Brown read verbatim several posts attacking him from a Facebook group dedicated to a pro-gay rights history teacher. Often he included both verbatim profanity and the names of the students who wrote them.
Militant members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in Britain have threatened students at Oxford who support the university's proposed South Parks laboratory saying they are legitimate targets for attack. A counter-activist group called Pro-Test has warned students not to support the lab's construction on Facebook as they believe ALF is monitoring the site.
After the death of a teenager under suspicious circumstances in July 2007, the Ottawa Citizen used comments from a Facebook memorial group in a slanderous manner to create a dramatic article on the front page city section showing the irresponsibility of the teen and his peers. The Citizen claimed that the teens thought they were supermen and were invincible and that they had no respect for the law. This sparked outrage amongst the users who wrote many letters to the editor of the Citizen, and the Citizen released an unofficial apology on the wall of the group.
According to Facebook's privacy policy, Facebook reserves the right to release the information that users provide (including favorite movies, television shows, books, music, etc.) to organizations.
Facebook was used by reporters in the Hendrick Hudson Senior Prank Bomb case to contact the involved students. The reporters had a facebook profile and left messages encouraging them to talk to the press about the legal case at hand.
Privacy Concerns
There have been some concerns expressed regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining. Theories have been written about the possible misuse of Facebook and privacy proponents have criticised the site's current privacy agreement. According to the policy, "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile." However, some features—such as AIM away-message harvesting and campus newspaper monitoring—have been dropped and Facebook has since responded to the concerns. Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done "for the CIA or any other group." However, the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14, 2005.
Another clause that some users are critical of reserves the right to sell users' data to private companies, stating "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." This concern has also been addressed by spokesman Chris Hughes who said "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to." It is unclear if Facebook plans to remove that clause as well.
Recently serious privacy concerns have been raised over the security of 3rd party applications that users may install on Facebook (for example vampires, super poke etc). Third party applications have access to almost all user information and "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information."
Facebook staff has the authority to view profiles in the event that the person is suspected of violating the site's terms of service.
In August 2007 the code used to dynamically generate Facebook's home and search page as visitors browse the site was accidentally made public, according to leading internet news sites. A configuration problem on a Facebook server caused the PHP code to be displayed instead of the web page the code should have created, raising concerns about how secure private data on the site was. A visitor to the site copied, published and later removed the code from his web forum, claiming he had been served legal notice by Facebook. Facebook's response was quoted by the site that broke the story.
"A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further."In the UK, the Trade Union Council has encouraged employers to allow their staff to access Facebook and other social networking sites from work, provided they proceed with caution.
In September 2007, Facebook drew a fresh round of criticism after it began allowing non-members to search for users, with the intent of opening limited "public profiles" up to search engines such as Google in the following months.
In October 2007, photos of an intern at Anglo Irish Bank, who was allegedly away at a "family emergency" in New York, were distributed around the office when it was discovered he had in fact attended a Halloween party.