Facebook

About

Facebook is a social networking website where people from around the world can add friends, join various networks and groups and upload photos and videos. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name for books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students identify each other. During the F8 conference on September 22nd, 2011, Facebook revealed they had reached 800 million users. According to an article by Social Media Today^[17], 41.6% of the population of the United States had a Facebook account as of August 2010.

History

Foundation

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while attending Harvard University.^[1] The early prototype of Facebook was initially called “Facemash,” and was launched on October 28th, 2003. according to the Harvard Crimson^[2], the site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not.

Zuckerberg used photos compiled from the online profiles of student houses, and placed two students next to each asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images.

In February 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” as a social networking site specifically for Harvard University students. In July of 2004, the Guardian^[3] reported that more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard registered on the service within the first month of launch.

Incorporation

Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and made entrepreneur Sean Parker, who started the music sharing website Napster and had been informally advising Zuckerberg, the company’s president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. The company dropped “The” from its name after purchasing the domain facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000. In September of 2005, the site opened up registration for high school networks. On September 26, 2006, Facebook officially opened up registration for anyone older than age of 13 with a valid e-mail address.

Facebook IPO

Even before Facebook reported its revenue profit for the first time in September 2009, rumors about Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) have been circulating both online and in the news media. In November 2010, online marketplace SecondMarket reported that Facebook’s value was estimated at $41 billion, surpassing that of eBays as the third largest largest U.S. web-based company after Google and Amazon.

On January 25th, Bloomberg^[32] reported that Facebook halted trading of its shares in secondary markets for three days, which analysts read as a possible indicator that the company is gearing up for the much-anticipated IPO process.

On January 27th, 2012, Wall Street Journal^[31] reported that Facebook Inc. is preparing to file for an initial public offering in early February with Morgan Stanley as the likely underwriter, citing company’s anonymous insiders who are apparently familiar with the matter. The article also reported that Facebook is looking to raise as much as $10 billion in its initial offering and a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion, which would be more than four times the capitalization Google had during its IPO in 2004. Facebook has not yet released an official statement regarding the rumors.

Controversy

Privacy

On September 27th, 2011, Redditor realbigfatty posted a thread titled “How to annoy Facebook”^[18] to the /r/funny subreddit. The post contained a link to an image outlining how to make a data request to Facebook to send all the personal data they have collected about you as part of the “european Data Protection Directive.”

The same day, Redditor endroop^[21] posted a screenshot of an email from Facebook saying they would not be able to fulfill his data request due to the volume of requests they were receiving. Shortly after, an article was published to the technology blog ZDnet^[20] that claimed the Reddit thread managed to “overwhelm Facebook with data requests.”

The image then goes on to explain that because of Britain’s 1988 Data Protection Act (DPA), Facebook has to send you your data on a CD within 40 days. It’s worth noting that this is a mistake, the DPA in question is Ireland’s. The CD contains a PDF that is typically more than 1,000 pages long and more than 100MB in size.

On September 28th, Reddit davesterist^[22] posted a screenshot of an email he received from Facebook explaining that they would not be fulfilling his request because he lives in the United States where there are no laws that require Facebook to send personal data.

Graphic Image Reports

On November 15th, 2011, various news outlets including CNN^[23], Time^[24] and Fox News^[25] published articles about reports that graphic photos of pornography and gore, including lewd photoshopped photos of celebrities like Justin Bieber, were showing up on their Facebook^[24] Newsfeeds. The unofficial Facebook blog All Facebook^[24] noted that this wasn’t the first time this type of spam had appeared on the social networking site:

This isn’t the first time that pornographic images have become spam on the site, but more than a year has passed since the last time we saw anything like it; and this time around the photos are much more explicit than the ones going up in August, 2010.

An article by MSNBC^[25] writer Helen A.S. Popkin noted that the resurgence of a hoax about hackers posting porn links invisible to the owner’s wall may have been related to the porn spam issue.

In that case, the screaming warnings claimed hackers would use a victim’s name to post porn videos to the Facebook walls of the victim’s Facebook friends. What’s more, these posts remained invisible to the victim. Several security agencies including Sophos say that they’ve found no evidence that hackers can are able to prevent you from seeing content they’ve posted using your name. This particular hoax first surfaced in September and it’s possible the resurgence may’ve been caused by panic over this current alleged rash of nasty spam.

Facebook confirmed^[28] the coordinated attacks, acknowledging that it may have been due to a self-XSS vulnerability in an unidentified browser. Users were unknowingly executing harmful JavaScript codes while completing normal activities on the site. While who was behind the images is unclear, AnonymousWiki^[29] have stated that they are not involved.

Features

News Feed

On September 21, 2011, Facebook updated their News Feed layout to automatically sort posts based on an algorithm that would determine what was most relevant to you, rather than chronological order.

Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner.

The new layout received a backlash from many users, and was covered by MSNBC in an article titled “Facebook gives the News Feed a makeover, users get angry.”^[7] The extra status updates in the top right corner struck some people as being redundant, inspiring the creation of an Xzibit Yo Dawg derivative:

Timeline

On September 22nd, 2011, Facebook held F8, an annual developers conference in San Francisco, where they unveiled a new profile layout called “Timeline.” The new layout used an algorithm to determine your top photos and posts to display along a timeline that shows less content as a user browses back in time.

On September 23rd, BuzzFeed^[7] revealed how Facebook users could enable the new Timeline profile 2 weeks early by faking the creation of an app. The same day they published a follow up post explaining how to use the new Timeline profile to view people who had unfriended you in the past.^[5] The post outlined how users could go back in their Timeline and discover who unfriended them by looking at the “Made X New Friends” boxes. People with “Add Friend” next to their name were those who had been removed as friends at some point. This feature was removed by the end of the day.

Timeline profiles became accessible to all 800 million Facebook users on December 15th, 2011.^[30]

Traffic

According to Techtree^[8], “Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors”, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. ComScore^[9] reports that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted 117.6 million.

According to Alexa^[10], the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is ranked 2nd worldwide as of September 23rd, 2011. Quantcast^[11] ranks the website 3rd in the U.S., and Compete.com^[12] ranks it 2nd in the U.S. According to The Start^[13], the website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.

Popularity

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several English-speaking countries including Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The website has received recognition in the “Top 100 Classic Websites” by PC Magazine^[14] in 2007, and the “People’s Voice Award” from the Webby Awards^[15] in 2008.

Memes on Facebook

Facebook has inspired several memes including bra status updates, tag games and has contributed to the popularity of various photo fads.

External References