After registering to use the website, users can produce a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos, use various apps and receive notifications once others update their profiles. Additionally, users may be a part of common-interest user teams, organized by workplace, school or school, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". Also, users can complain or block unpleasant individuals. Facebook had over 1.59 billion monthly active users as of August 2015. Because of the large volume of knowledge users withstand the service, Facebook has come beneath scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public giving in Feb 2012 and began commerce stock to the general public 3 months later, reaching an original peak capitalization of $104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the customary & Poor's five hundred Index to achieve a market cap of $250 billion. Following its Q3 earnings call in 2015, Facebook's market cap exceeded $300 billion.
History
2003–06: Thefacebook, Thiel investment and name change
Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on Oct twenty eight, 2003, while attending Harvard University as a sophomore (second year student). According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was such as Hot or Not and used "photos compiled from the web facebooks of 9 homes, placing 2 next to every different at a time and asking users to decide on the 'hotter' person"To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of Harvard's computer network and traced personal dormitory ID pictures. Harvard did not have a student "Facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information) at the time, although individual homes had been supplying their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s, and Harvard's longtime Freshman Yearbook was conversationally referred to because the "Freshman Facebook". Facemash attracted 450 visitors and twenty two,000 photo-views in its first four hours on-line.
The site was quickly forwarded to many field cluster list-servers, but was shut down some 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. Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by making a social study tool previous associate humanities examination. He uploaded 500 statesman pictures to a web site, each of that was featured with a corresponding comments section. He shared the site along with his classmates, and people started sharing notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in Jan 2004. He said he was galvanized by associate editorial concerning the Facemash incident within the Harvard Crimson. On February four, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
Six days after the web site launched, three Harvard seniors—Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra—accused Zuckerberg of intentionally dishonorable them into basic cognitive process he would facilitate them build a social network calledHarvardConnection.com. They claimed that he was instead using their ideas to build a competitive product. The three complained to The Harvard Crimson associated the newspaper began an investigation. They later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently subsidence in 2008 for one.2 million shares (worth $300 million at Facebook's IPO).
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College; at intervals the initial month, more than 0.5 the undergraduates at Harvard were registered on the service. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help promote the web site. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to the universities of Columbia,Stanford, and Yale. It later opened to all conference colleges, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in the us and North American nation.
In mid-2004, entrepreneur Sean Parker — associate informal adviser to Zuckerberg — became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California. It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2005, the company dropped "the" from its name once getting the name facebook.com for US$200,000., the domain facebook.com belonged to AboutFace Corporation before the purchase. this website last appeared on Apr eight, 2005, whereas from April ten, 2005 to August 4, 2005, this domain gave a 403 error.
In May 2005, Accel Partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and Jim Breyer added $1 million of his own cash. A January 2009 vie.com study ranked Facebook the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users. Entertainment Weekly enclosed the web site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list speech communication, "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?
A high-school version of the site was launched in Sep 2005, which Zuckerberg referred to as the next logical step. (At the time, high-school networks required Associate in Nursing invite to hitch. Facebook also expanded membership eligibility to workers of many firms, including Apple Iraqi National Congress. and Microsoft.
Offices
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park.All users outside of the US and North American nation have a contract with Facebook's Irish subsidiary "Facebook eire Limited". This allows Facebook to avoid U.S. taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Facebook is making use of the Double Irish arrangement that permits it to pay simply regarding 2–3% corporation tax on all international revenue.
In 2010, Facebook opened its fourth office, in Hyderabad and the first in Asia.
Facebook, which in 2010 had a lot of than 750 million active users globally together with over twenty three million in Republic of India, announced that its Hyderabad center would house on-line advertising and developer support groups and give around-the-clock, multilingual support to the social networking site's users and advertisers globally. With this, Facebook joins other giants like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, IBM and Computer Associates that have already set up look. In Hyderabad, it is registered as 'Facebook India on-line Services Pvt Ltd'.
Though Facebook did not specify its Republic of India investment or hiring figures, it said enlisting had already begun for a director of operations and alternative key positions at Hyderabad, which would supplement its operations in California, Dublin in eire as well as at state capital, Texas.
A custom-built knowledge center with well reduced ("38% less") power consumption compared to existing Facebook knowledge centers opened in Apr 2011 inPrineville, Oregon. In April 2012, Facebook opened a second data center in Forest town, North Carolina, US. In June 2013, Facebook opened a third data center in Luleå, Sweden. In November 2014, Facebook opened a fourth data center in town, Iowa, US.
On October one, 2012, CEO Zuckerberg visited Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook's position within the Russian market. 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 gap a research center in national capital. Facebook has roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic analogue VK has around thirty four million.
The functioning of a woodwork facility on the Menlo Park campus was declared at the finish of August 2013. The facility, opened in June 2013, provides equipment, safety courses and woodwork learning course, while staff area unit needed to purchase materials at the in-house store. A Facebook spokesperson explained that the intention of the facility is to encourage staff to assume in associate degree innovative manner owing to the various setting, and also serves as a lovely perk for prospective staff.
Alexa Overview
Impact
Media impact
In April 2011, Facebook launched a new portal for marketers and artistic agencies to assist them develop brand promotions on Facebook. The company began its push by inviting a get cluster of British advertising leaders to satisfy Facebook's prime executives at associate degree "influencers' summit" in Gregorian calendar month 2010. Facebook has now been concerned in campaigns for True Blood,American Idol, and Top Gear. News and media outlets such as the Washington Post, Financial Times and alphabet News have used aggregate Facebook fan knowledge to produce varied infographics and charts to accompany their articles. In 2012, the beauty pageant Miss land Online was run solely mistreatment Facebook.Social impact
Facebook has affected the social life and activity of people in varied ways that. Facebook allows individuals mistreatment computers or mobile phones to endlessly keep in bit with friends, relatives and other acquaintances where they area unit within the world, as long as there is access to the net. It has reunited lost members of the family and friends. It allows users to trade concepts, stay advised with native or international developments, and unite people with common interests and/or beliefs through open, closed and private teams and different pages.Facebook's social impact has also modified however individuals communicate. Rather than having to reply to others through email, Facebook allows users to broadcast or share content to others, and thereby to engage others or be engaged with others' posts.
Facebook has been successful and additional socially impactful than several different social media sites. David Kirkpatrick, technology journalist and author of The Facebook Effect, believes that Facebook is structured in a way that's not simply standardized. He challenges users to consider however troublesome it might be to maneuver all the relationships and photos to an alternate. Facebook has let people participate in associate degree atmosphere with the "over the grounds fence quality" of atiny low city, despite the move to larger cities.
Emotional health impact
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 rancor triggers. Other current causes of envy embody posts by friends regarding family happiness and pictures of physical beauty—such jealous feelings leave individuals lonely and discontented with their own lives. A joint study by two German universities discovered that one out of 3 individuals were a lot of discontented with their lives when visiting Facebook, ANd another study by Utah depression University found that school students felt worse regarding their own lives following an increase within the quantity of your time spent on Facebook.According to professor of scientific discipline Susan Krauss Whitbourne, although Facebook has AN face of friending individuals, there is also the draw back of getting somebody unfriend or reject another person. Whitbourne refers to unfriended persons on Facebook as victims of estrangement. Unfriending someone is rarely a mutual call and the person typically doesn't understand they need been unfriended.
Political impact
In February 2008, a Facebook group referred to as "One Million Voices Against FARC" organized AN event during which many thousands of Republic of Colombians marched in protest against the Revolutionary militia of Colombia, better best-known as the terrorist organization (from the group's Spanish name). In August 2010, one of North Korea's official government websites and also the official news organization of the country, Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook.During the Arab Spring several journalists created claims that Facebook compete a major role in generating the 2011 Egyptian revolution. On January fourteen, the Facebook page of "We are all khaled Said" was started by Wael Ghoniem produce Event to invite the Egyptian individuals to "peaceful demonstrations" on January twenty five. According to Mashable, in Tunisia and Egpyt, Facebook became the primary tool for connecting all protesters and led the Egyptian government of Prime Minister Nazif to ban Facebook, Twitter and another websites on January twenty six then ban all mobile and web connections for all of Egypt at time of day January twenty eight. After eighteen days, the uprising forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign.
In Bahrain uprising that started on Feb fourteen, 2011, Facebook was utilized by the Bahraini regime as well as regime loyalists to spot, capture and prosecute citizens concerned in the protests. A 20-year-old girl named Ayat Al Qurmezi was known as a protester mistreatment Facebook, taken from her home by masked commandos and place in jail.
In 2011, Facebook filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to create a political action committee below the name FB commission. In an email to The Hill, a spokesman for Facebook aforementioned "Facebook Political Action Committee can offer our workers a method to create their voice detected within the political method by supporting candidates World Health Organization share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy whereas giving folks the ability to share and build the planet additional open and connected."
During the Syrian civil war, the YPG, a libertarian army for Rojava has recruited westerners through Facebook in its fight against ISIL. Dozens have joined its ranks for various reasons from spiritual to philosophical . The Facebook page's name "The Lions of Rojava" comes from a Kurdish saying that interprets as "A lion is a lion, whether it's a feminine or a male", reflecting the organisation's feminist ideology.
United States
Facebook's role in the American political method was incontestable in January 2008, shortly before the New Hampshire primary, when Facebook teamed up withABC and Saint St. Anselm school to permit users to offer live feedback concerning the "back to back" January five Republican and Democratic debates. Facebook users took part in dialogue teams organized around specific topics, register to vote, and message questions.Over a million people put in the Facebook application "US Politics on Facebook" so as to require half, and the application measured users' responses to specific comments made by the debating candidates. This debate showed the broader community what several young students had already experienced: Facebook as a fashionable and powerful new thanks to act and voice opinions. A poll by CBS News, UWIRE and The Chronicle of upper Education claimed as an example how the "Facebook effect" has affected youth vote rates, support by youth of political candidates, and general involvement by the youth population in the 2008 election.
The new social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, made use 1st of the personal pc and therefore the net, and after 2010 of the sensible phones to connect many voluminous folks, especially those underneath age thirty five. By 2008, politicians and interest groups were experimenting with systematic use of social media to unfold their message among abundant larger audiences than they had antecedently reached.
Facebook is having a bearing on regime yet. Justin Smith, a Colorado sheriff uses Facebook to publicise his ideas on matters relating to native, state, and national concerns. He also publicizes crimes, particularly those that his department solves. He has seven thousand followers on the social medium, considered a massive variety. Smith said that he seldom goes out in public "when i do not get feedback from people. … Facebook is an attention-grabbing tool as a result of i believe it holds candidates and electoral officers additional responsible. Voters know wherever somebody stands."
As American political strategists flip their attention to the 2016 presidential contest, they identify Facebook as Associate in Nursing progressively necessary advertising tool. Recent technical innovations have made attainable additional advanced divisions and subdivisions of the voters. Most important, Facebook can currently deliver video ads to tiny, highly targeted subsets. Television, by contrast, shows the same commercials to all or any viewers, and so can not be exactly tailored.