Facebook (website)

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Image:Logo-left.jpg Facebook, formerly known as thefacebook, is a social networking website specifically for college, university, and now high school communities, primarily those in the United States. The name is based on the paper facebooks that many colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community. Any user with access to a valid .edu e-mail address from a supported school can register for and access the site, a group that includes most faculty and staff members, although the vast majority of Facebook’s users are students. As of 2005, it has the largest number of registered users among college networking sites.

Contents

Features

Like other social networking websites, Facebook allows users to create an online profile and upload a user picture. Users can then search for other users and request an acknowledgment that they are "friends." By clicking on profile entries, such as favorite music, current residence or high school, a user can browse through relevant listings, or may choose to use the site's search feature. The profiles of users from each institution included in the network are stored on a unique subdomain, which limits profile viewing. A user may only view the profiles of users at his or her institution, although mutual friends from different schools may access each other's profiles. Furthermore, users can visualize the connections between their friends via SVG technology.

Each facebook profile consists of the user's name, hometown and contact information, class schedule and personal interests. Each user is given a "wall", for public peer-to-peer messaging. Personal information is voluntarily supplied by the user, and access to it can be restricted, as can access to the wall, whose entries are also deletable by the user.

Members may also create and join groups. These groups range from online mirrors of real campus organizations, such as Greek fraternities, sports, and recognized clubs, to common interest groups (such as people from the same area code or people who attended a public school), to joke groups. As of late spring 2005, Facebook replaced its largely unused “away message” feature with a feature that allows users to list parties, invite users and receive RSVPs. Like the groups feature, the party listing has also been used for jokes, although fraternities often announce parties through this. Groups made by a user are limited to membership within the user's school; however, some advertisers can create groups that have membership from all campuses.

Facebook also allows users to send private messages and “pokes” to other users. The "poke" feature simply sends the text, "You have been poked," and provides an option to poke back. However, the context of what a poke means is still to be determined.

A new feature allows users to browse through their friends through a map that represents the user’s friends’ current locations or hometowns.

All features are free, except for public announcements, which are a type of advertising students can purchase on Facebook. The website also generates revenue from mainstream advertisers who are interested in targeting college students, such as Apple Computer.

History

Facebook was founded as Thefacebook in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz at Harvard College. The website spread across the Harvard campus and within a few weeks, over half the undergraduate population had registered. The website then expanded to allow students from Columbia University, Stanford University, and then other Ivy League colleges, and then UC Berkeley to register. It became something of a network phenomenon, spreading rapidly to other schools, despite some competition from similar, local websites.

As the site’s popularity rose and advertising revenue grew, Moskovitz and Zuckerberg left Harvard to run their website fulltime. The pair soon moved to Palo Alto, California, established an office and recruited a staff of eight.

In November 2004, the number of registered users exceeded one million. As of July 2005, the network has expanded to include 835 institutions across the United States and includes 2.5 million users. As of the spring of 2005, the company also expanded to include a small number of international institutions and U.S. community colleges.

Stories about Thefacebook became commonplace in online and print media. Simultaneously, several competitor sites appeared attempting to capture some of the limelight. In late 2004, the owners of the website ConnectU, another social networking website targeted towards college students, filed a lawsuit against Thefacebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had stolen source code intended for their website while in their employ [1] [2].

In the Spring of 2005, Thefacebook rolled out a beta version of Wirehog [3], a peer-to-peer file sharing program that uses an external application to allow users to share pictures, documents and music through Thefacebook.

At an unknown point between the autumn of 2004 and the spring of 2005, Zuckerberg met Napster and Plaxo founder Sean Parker, who joined Thefacebook as its president. Parker introduced Zuckerberg to, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, who invested $500,000 in the company and took a seat on its board of directors. On May 27, 2005, Accel Partners, a California venture capital firm, announced that it would infuse Thefacebook with US$13 million with Jim Breyer, one of the firm’s managing partners, joining Thiel, Zuckerberg and Parker on the board.

In late August 2005, it was announced on the main website that the domain name facebook.com was acquired from Aboutface Corporation, and the website moved domains and dropped the "the" from the site name effective August 23, 2005. Also included in the move was a site overhaul, making profile pages more "user-friendly," according to Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has since added more universities to facebook (with an emphasis on forgotten schools in Canada as well as in the United States), but unlike in the past, the new schools are no longer publicized on the front page.

On September 2, 2005, deeming it the "next logical thing" to do, Zuckerberg launched a high school version of Facebook. The high school version will be kept separated from the college version, so that "nobody in high school can search for you, see your profile or even send you a message" and vice versa. Although high school students could only join via an invitation for the first weeks, by September 17, an invitation was no longer necessary for most schools.

By October 2005, Facebook had nearly completed its expansion to smaller universities and junior colleges throughout the United States and Canada. In addition, Facebook expanded to 21 universities in the United Kingdom, and added the entire Instituto Tecnologico system in Mexico, among other non-US schools.

Criticisms

Some have argued that Facebook is not as user-friendly as other college-networking websites. For example, Facebook has been criticized for not allowing users to view profiles of people at other colleges who have not already listed them as a friend. Problems with maintenance have been an issue as many new accounts are made each day causing heavy traffic for the servers. Furthermore, there are still many bugs in the coding that has caused minor problems for some users.

Another criticism, which many claim as their reason for not using it, is its addictive nature to become a popularity contest. Users often boast of their "friend" count, with special emphasis going to the number of friends at other universities. With many users having friend counts of over 1000, it is highly unlikely that the user knows all of his or her "friends," let alone has met them in person.

A recent phenomenon is the creation of fake profiles. Registration is open to all email addresses within a specific domain name (@school.edu); students may take advantage of this if they possess multiple email addresses or if a variant of his or her name forwards to the same address. As a result, littering Facebook's database are celebrities such as Bill Clinton, Jesus, Monty Burns, Stacy's Mom, and Poppin' Fresh, and campus personalities such as football coaches, university presidents, and athletics mascots.

Schools block access

The University of New Mexico in October 2005 blocked access to Facebook from UNM campus computers and networks, citing unsolicited e-mails and a similar site called UNM Facebook. [4] After a UNM user signed into Facebook.com from off campus, a message from Facebook said, "We are working with the UNM administration to lift the block and have explained that it was instituted based on erroneous information, but they have not yet committed to restore your access."

UNM, in a message to students who tried to access the site from the UNM network, wrote, "This site is temporarily unavailable while UNM and the site owners work out procedural issues. The site is in violation of UNM's Acceptable Computer Use Policy for abusing computing resources (e.g., spamming, trademark infringement, etc.). The site forces use of UNM credentials (e.g., NetID or email address) for non-UNM business."

External links

See also

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