Facebook is an online social networking service. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to students at some American universities.[7] Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University studentsEduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[8] The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before it opened to high-school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.[9]
Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and receive 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". As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users,[10] of which 8.7% are fake.[11] Facebook (as of 2012) has about 180 petabytes of data per year and grows by over half a petabyte every 24 hours.[12]
In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and Jim Breyer[13] added $1 million of his own money. A January 2009Compete.com study ranked Facebook the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.[14] Entertainment Weeklyincluded 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?"[15] Facebook eventually filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012; it is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.[2] Facebook Inc. began selling stock to the public and trading on the NASDAQ on May 18, 2012.[16] Based on its 2012 income of US$5.1 billion, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 list for the first time on the list published in May 2013, being placed at position 462.[17]
In 2012, Facebook was valued at $104 billion.[18] As of January 2014, the company has about 1.15 billion monthly users
Pre-IPO
Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash 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"[20][21]
To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied private dormitory ID images. Harvard did not have a student "Facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information) at the time, although individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.[20][22]
The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers,[clarification needed] but was shut down a few 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.[23] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final. He uploaded 500 Augustan images to a website, and each image was featured with a corresponding comments section.[22] He shared the site with his classmates and people started sharing notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He said he was inspired by an editorial about the Facemash incident in The Harvard Crimson.[24]On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[25]
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. They claimed he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.[26] The three complained to The Harvard Crimson and the newspaper began an investigation. They later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling in 2008[27] for 1.2m in shares (worth $300m at Facebook's IPO).[28]
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College; within the first month, more than half the undergraduates at Harvard were registered on the service.[29] Eduardo Saverin(business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to the universities of Columbia, Stanford, and Yale.[30] It later opened to all Ivy League colleges, Boston University, New York University, the MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[31][32]
In mid-2004, entrepreneur Sean Parker (an informal advisor to Zuckerberg) became the company's president.[33] In June 2004, Facebook moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California.[30] It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[34] In 2005, the company dropped the from its name after purchasing the domain namefacebook.com for $200,000.[35]
A high-school version of the site was launched in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[36] (At the time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.)[37]Facebook expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[38] On September 26, 2006, Facebook was opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address.[39][40]
In late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages (pages which allowed companies to promote themselves and attract customers). These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned.[when?][41]
On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.[42] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international adverts on the social networking site.[43] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[44] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.[45] In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc. (an exchange for privately held companies' shares), Facebook's value was $41 billion; it slightly surpassed eBay's became the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon.com.[46]
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.[47]
In March 2011, it was reported that Facebook takes approximately 20,000 profiles offline every day for infractions including spam, inappropriate content and underage use, as part of its efforts to boost cyber security.[48]
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move its headquarters to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.[49][50]
Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion page views in the month of June 2011, making it the most visited website tracked by DoubleClick.[51]
According to the Nielsen Media Research study, released in December 2011, Facebook is the second most accessed website in the US (behind Google).[52]
In March 2012, Facebook announced App Center, an store selling applications that operate via the site. The store will be available to iPhone, Android and mobile web users.[53]
Facebook held an initial public offering on May 17, 2012, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece. The company was valued at at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.[18]
Initial public offering
Main article: Facebook IPO
Facebook filed their S1 document with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 1, 2012. The company applied for a US$5 billion initial public offering (IPO); one of the biggest in the history of technology and the biggest in Internet history.[54] Facebook valued its stock at $38 a share which priced the company at $104 billion – the largest valuation to date for a new public company.[55][56] The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history.[57][58] The shares began trading on May 18; the stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, but set a record for the trading volume of an IPO (460 million shares).[59] The first day of trading was marred by technical glitches that prevented orders from going through;[60] only the technical problems and artificial support from underwriters prevented the stock price from falling below the IPO price on the day.[61]
It was revealed later[when?] that Facebook's lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley (MS), JP Morgan (JPM), and Goldman Sachs (GS) cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow.[62] The stock continued its freefall in subsequent days, closing at 34.03 on May 21 and 31.00 on May 22. A 'circuit breaker' was used in an attempt to slow down the stock price's decline.[63] Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Chairman Rick Ketchum called for a review of the circumstances surrounding the IPO.[64]
Facebooks' IPO is now under investigation and has been compared to pump and dump schemes.[60][62][64][65] A class-action lawsuit was filed in May 2012 due to the trading glitches, which led to botched orders.[66][67] Apparently,[according to whom?] the glitches prevented a number of investors from selling the stock during the first day of trading while the stock price was falling – forcing them to incur bigger losses when their trades finally went through.
Lawsuits have been filed alleging that an underwriter for Morgan Stanley selectively revealed adjusted earnings estimates to preferred clients.[68] The other underwriters (MS, JPM, GS) and Facebook's CEO and board are also facing litigation.[69] It is believed that adjustments to earnings estimates were communicated to the underwriters by a Facebook financial officer, who used the information to cash out on their positions while leaving the general public with overpriced shares.[70]
By the end of May 2012, the stock lost over a quarter of its starting value, which led to the Wall Street Journal calling the IPO a "fiasco."[71]
After IPO
In July 2012, Facebook added a gay marriage icon to its timeline feature.[72] On August 23, 2012, Facebook released an update to its iOS app (version 5.0), which changed how data was collected and displayed to make it faster. On January 15, 2013, Facebook announced Graph Search, which provides users with a "precise answer" rather than a link to an answer by leveraging the data present on its site.[73] Facebook emphasized that the feature would be "privacy-aware," returning only results from content already shared with the user.[74] The company is the subject of a lawsuit by Rembrandt Social Media for patents involving the "Like" button.[75] On April 3, 2013, Facebook unveiled Home, a user-interface layer for Android devices offering greater integration with the site. HTC announced the HTC First, a smartphone with Home pre-loaded.[76] On April 15, 2013, Facebook announced an alliance across 19 states with the National Association of Attorneys General to provide teenagers and parents with information on tools to manage social networking profiles.[77] On April 19, 2013, Facebook officially modified its logo to remove the faint blue line at the bottom of the "F" icon. The letter F moved closer to the edge of the box.[78]
Following a campaign by 100 advocacy groups, Facebook agreed to update its policy on hate speech. The campaign highlighted content promoting domestic and sexual violence against women, and used over 57,000 tweets and more than 4,900 emails that caused withdrawal of advertising from the site by 15 companies, including Nissan UK, House of Burlesque and Nationwide UK. The social media website initially responded by stating that "while it may be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our policies".[79] It decided to take action on May 29, 2013 after it "become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate."[80]
On June 12, 2013, Facebook announced on its newsroom that it was introducing clickable hashtags to help users follow trending discussions or search what others are talking about on a topic.[81] A July 2013 Wall Street Journal article identified the Facebook IPO as the cause of a change in the U.S.' national economic statistics, as the company home (San Mateo County, California) became the top wage-earning county in the country after the fourth quarter of 2012. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the average weekly wage in the county wasUS$3,240, 107% higher than the previous year. It noted the wages were "the equivalent of $168,000 a year, and more than 50% higher than the next highest county, New York County (better known as Manhattan), which came in at $2,107 a week, or roughly $110,000 a year."[82]
Russian internet firm Mail.Ru sold its Facebook shares for US$525 million on September 5, 2013, following its initial US$200 million investment in 2009. Partly owned by Russia's richest manAlisher Usmanovhe, the firm owned a total of 14.2 million remaining shares prior to the sale.[83] In the same month, the Chinese government announced that it will lift the ban on Facebook in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone "to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone." Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009.[84]
Facebook is part of The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) (which was launched in October 2013). The A4AI is a coalition of public and private organisations that includes Google, Intel andMicrosoft. Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Google will help to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.[85]
A Reuters report, published on December 11, 2013, stated that Standard & Poor's announced the placement of Facebook onto its S&P 500 index "after the close of trading on December 20."[86]
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Corporate affairs
Management
The ownership percentages of the company, as of 2012, are: Mark Zuckerberg: 28%,[87] Accel Partners: 10%, Digital Sky Technologies: 10%,[88] Dustin Moskovitz: 6%, Eduardo Saverin: 5%,Sean Parker: 4%, Peter Thiel: 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft: 1.3%, Li Ka-shing: 0.8%, the Interpublic Group: less than 0.5%. A small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Adam D'Angelo, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company. The remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors.[89] Adam D'Angelo, former chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.[90]
Key management personnel comprise Chris Cox (VP of Product), Sheryl Sandberg (COO), and Mark Zuckerberg (Chairman and CEO). As of April 2011, Facebook has over 2,000 employees, and offices in 15 countries.[91] Other managers include chief financial officer David Ebersman and public relations head Elliot Schrage.[92]
Facebook was named the 5th best company to work for in 2014 by company-review site Glassdoor as part of its sixth annual Employees' Choice Awards. The website stated that 93% of Facebook employees would recommend the company to a friend.[93]
Revenue
| Year | Revenue | Growth |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | $52[96] | — |
| 2007 | $150[97] | 188% |
| 2008 | $280[98] | 87% |
| 2009 | $775[99] | 177% |
| 2010 | $2,000[100] | 158% |
| 2011 | $4,270[101] | 114% |
Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major Web sites. According to BusinessWeek.com, banner advertisements on Facebook have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks compared to those on the Web as a whole,[102] although specific comparisons can reveal a much larger disparity. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),[103] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).[104]
Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, reports that successful advertising campaigns on the site can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.[105] By comparison, the CTR for competing social network MySpace is about 0.1%, about 2.5 times better than Facebook's rate but still low compared to many other Web sites. The cause of Facebook's low CTR has been attributed to younger users enabling ad blocking software and being better at ignoring advertising messages, as well as the site being used more for the purpose of social communication as opposed to viewing content.[106]
On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.[107] A study found that, for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry average was 25% for in-banner video ads.[108]
Mergers and acquisitions
Main article: List of acquisitions by Facebook
On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced it had acquired the domain name fb.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation for an undisclosed amount. On January 11, 2011, the Farm Bureau disclosed $8.5 million in "domain sales income", making the acquisition of FB.com one of the ten highest domain sales in history.[109]
Offices
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.
All users outside of the US and Canada have a contract with Facebook's Irish subsidiary "Facebook Ireland Limited". This allows Facebook to avoid US taxes for all users in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and South America. Facebook is making use of the Double Irish arrangement which allows it to pay just about 2-3% corporation tax on all international revenue.[110]
Facebook, which in 2010 had more than 750 million active users globally including over 23 million in India, announced that its Hyderabad centre would house online advertising and developer support teams and provide round-the-clock, multi-lingual support to the social networking site's users and advertisers globally.[115] With this, Facebook joins other giants like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, IBM and Computer Associates that have already set up shop.[116] In Hyderabad, it is registered as 'Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd'.[117][118][119]
Though Facebook did not specify its India investment or hiring figures, it said recruitment had already begun for a director of operations and other key positions at Hyderabad,[120] which would supplement its operations in California, Dublin in Ireland as well as at Austin, Texas.
A custom-built data center with substantially reduced ("38% less") power consumption compared to existing Facebook data centers opened in April 2011 in Prineville, Oregon.[121] In April 2012, Facebook opened a second data center in Forest City, North Carolina, US.[122]
On October 1, 2012, CEO Zuckerberg visited Moscow to stimulate social media innovation in Russia and to boost Facebook’s position in the Russian market.[123] 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 opening a research center in Moscow. Facebook has roughly 9 million users in Russia, while domestic analogue VK has around 34 million.[124]
The functioning of a woodwork facility on the Menlo Park campus was announced at the end of August 2013. The facility, opened in June 2013, provides equipment, safety courses and woodwork learning course, while employees are required to purchase materials at the in-house store. A Facebook spokesperson explained that the intention of the facility is to encourage employees to think in an innovative manner due to the different environment, and also serves as an attractive perk for prospective employees.[125]
Open source contributions
Facebook is both a consumer of and contributor to free and open source software.[126] Facebook's contributions include: HipHop for PHP,[127] Fair scheduler in Apache Hadoop,[128] Apache Hive, Apache Cassandra,[129] and the Open Compute Project.[130]
Facebook also contributes to other opensource projects such as Oracle's MySQL database engine.[131][132]
Website
Main articles: Facebook features and Facebook Platform
User profile
Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (called "fan pages" until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.[133] Facebook has been prompted to add a "third gender", "other", or "intersex" tab in the gender option which contains only male and female.[134] Facebook refused and said that individuals can "opt out of showing their sex on their profile".[135] A 2012 Pew Internet and American Life study identified that between 20–30% of Facebook users are "power users" who frequently link, poke, post and tag themselves and others.[136] The user page is set up in a minimal fashion with blue as the main color. This was done because Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind.[137]
On June 13, 2009, Facebook introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can be linked with simpler URLs such as
https://www.facebook.com/facebook instead of https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728.[138] Many newsmartphones offer access to Facebook services through either their Web browsers or applications. An official Facebook application is available for the operating systems Android, iOS, and webOS. Nokia and Research In Motion both provide Facebook applications for their own mobile devices. More than 425 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices across 200 mobile operators in 60 countries.[139]Comparison with Myspace
The media often compares Facebook to Myspace, but one significant difference between the two Web sites is the level of customization.[140] Another difference is Facebook's requirement that users give their true identity, a demand that MySpace does not make.[141] MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook allows only plain text.[142] Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact. They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see;[143] Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked);[144] Photos, where users can upload albums and photos;[145] and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions.[146] Depending on privacy settings, anyone who can see a user's profile can also view that user's Wall. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.[143]
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