Facebook, Inc.Facebook.svg
Type Private
Founded Cambridge, Massachusetts,
United States (2004)
Founder(s)
Mark Zuckerberg
Eduardo Saverin
Dustin Moskovitz
Chris Hughes
Headquarters Menlo Park,
California, U.S.
Area served Worldwide
Key people
Mark Zuckerberg (CEO)
Sheryl Sandberg (COO)
David Ebersman (CFO)
Donald Graham (Chairman)
Industry Internet
Revenue increase US$ 3.71 billion (2011), up from $1.97b (2010)
Employees 3000+ (2011)
Website Facebook.com
IPv6 support www.v6.facebook.com
Alexa rank steady 2 (February 2012)
Type of site Social networking service
Advertising Banner ads, referral marketing, casual games
Registration Required
Users 845 million (active December 31, 2011)
Available in Multilingual
Launched February 4, 2004
Current status Active
Facebook is a social networking
service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by
Facebook, Inc. As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active
users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a
personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including
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". The name of the
service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the
start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United
States to help students get to know each
other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years
old to become registered users of the site.
Facebook was founded by Mark
Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin,
Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The Web site'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. However, based on
ConsumersReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with
accounts, violating the site's terms of service.
A January 2009 Compete.com study
ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly
active users. 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?" Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9
million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011. According to Social Media
Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S.
population had a Facebook account. Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started
to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United
States and Canada
in May 2011. Facebook filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012.
History
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"
o 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).
Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours
online.
The site was quickly forwarded to
several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the
Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with
breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and
faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped. 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 Web site,
with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened the site up to
his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.
The following semester,
Zuckerberg began writing code for a new Web site in January 2004. He was
inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash
incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook",
originally located at thefacebook.com.
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. The three
complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation.
The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.
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. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects),
Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris
Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the Web site. In March 2004,
Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia,
and Yale. 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.
Facebook was incorporated in
mid-2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising
Zuckerberg, became the company's president.In June 2004, Facebook moved its
base of operations to Palo Alto, California.It received its first investment
later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.The company dropped The
from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for
$200,000.
