Research Paper About Facebook

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several English-speaking countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. And it was launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Facebook is a popular free social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues.As of July 2010  Facebook has more than 500 million active users. Users 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. The name of the service stems from the  colloquial name for the book  given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to ge t to know each other better.Facebook allows anyone who declares them to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website. Facebook was founded by  Mark Zuckerberg  with his college roommates and fellow computer science students  Eduardo Saverin,  Dustin Moskovitz  and  Chris Hughes. The website'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, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. A January 2009  Compete. om  study ranked Facebook as the most used  social network  by worldwide monthly active users, followed byMySpace. [9]  Entertainment Weekly  put it on its end-of-the-decade â€Å"best-of† list, saying, â€Å"How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug ou r friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook? â€Å"[10]  Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135. 1 million monthly unique U. S. visitors. [11] C. Significance of Facebook Sometimes it is taking a while to get an understanding of the importance of something that is as much in the hype as Facebook is currently in 2007.With its recent positioning as an application platform Facebook has in our view become a unique challenger to established players in the field of Personal Information Infrastructure like Microsoft and Google. We are going to explain this in a way that hopefully also those can get at least the concept behind it who had so far (maybe even after they done a quick inspection of Facebook and some other â€Å"social networks† themselves) a difficult time in understanding the significance of Facebook contribution to application platforms in general. Applications are the building blocks of everyone’s Personal Information Infrastructure.Every a pplication is one block and provides users with a specific, bundled set of features. Sometimes applications (â€Å"integrated applications†) as we know them are sharing important pieces of personally maintained information like Contacts, sometimes they do not. Facebook application; a user is running to access the Facebook Contacts of this user. More importantly: Whenever the user does something of significance inside any Facebook application the platform itself will inform automatically his Contacts about it; Example: Your friend Paul just uploaded a new photo to his album!Your personal Facebook experience is depending on the number and level of activity of your Facebook Contacts. If there is no one on Facebook you know then the value of Facebook will be little or zero for you; but the more of your Contacts are using Facebook applications actively the more value in terms of â€Å"Getting to know about what they do† You will get out of Facebook (classical case of the â €Å"Network Effect†: the more people using a network the higher is the value for the individual user).These messages that the platform is continuously distributing to the Contacts of a user are one of the core features of the application platform Facebook: With this basic mechanism Facebook is allowing that Facebook users by just using their Facebook applications are staying automatically in contact with their Facebook Contacts. One standard argument against the overall value of Facebook is that staying in such an online and direct way in touch is something that is interesting only for â€Å"the younger generation†. That is maybe true or not. But there is another aspect.If you are for example a senior developer and you are not interested in staying in contact with your Contacts automatically then maybe you are interested in the potential business opportunity: Facebook is not only encouraging developers to create their own applications that will run inside Facebook (on top of the platform). The Facebook platform has also build in a simple but effective mechanism to promote the usage of your newly created application: All Contacts of any new user of your Facebook application will get (in exactly the same way as already described) a notification that these users just started to use your application.This form of directly â€Å"build in application promotion/marketing† for your application can deliver high numbers of users to any application so fast that probably most application providers will be challenged to handle the demand (please see for details this excellent article from Marc Andreessen ). Example : I find it fascinating how important Facebook has become in todays society. Below are 2 examples of how ridiculous it is: A. A friend of mine, and his gf broke up. A month or so later I saw that his FB profile read â€Å"In a relationship† so I called him.He and his gf got back together and it was very important to her that he change his status to that. I thought it was trivial but it was a huuuge deal to her. B. Last night I get a call from a friend who has been having marital problems. he called to tell me he thinks his marraige is over. We go over the whole story and I tell him to wait and see if she calms down. He says he knows it's over because she de-friended him on facebook. Am I the only one who is so surprised at how important FB has become to people in their personal lives? D.Development of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not, and according to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash â€Å"used photos compiled from the online Facebook of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter' person†. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network, and copied th e houses' private dormitory ID images.Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos and basic information, and Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. That the initial site mirrored people's physical community with their real identities represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook. 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 website, 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 website 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 â€Å"The Facebook†, originally located at thefacebook. com. Just 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), D ustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued when it opened as well to all other Ivy League schools and Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States. Total active users  (in millions)|Date| Users| Days later| Monthly growth| August 26, 2008| 100| 1,665| 178. 38%| April 8, 2009| 200| 225| 13. 33%| September 15, 2009| 300| 150| 10%| February 5, 2010| 400| 143| 6. 99%| July 21, 2010| 500| 166| 4. 52%| —| 600| 143 (ongoing)| —| Facebook  incorporated  in the summer of 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  P ayPal  co-founder  Peter Thiel. The company dropped  from its name after purchasing the  domain name  facebook. om in 2005 for $200,000. Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including  Apple Inc. and  Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to every one of ages 13 and older with a valid  email address. 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.Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook. In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin,  Ireland. In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time. [  In November 2010, based on Second Market Inc. , an exchange for share of privately held companies, Facebook value was $41 billion (surpassing EBay's slightly), and it became the third-largest US Web Company after Google and Amazon. Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.Facebook also became the top social network across eight individual markets in Asia—the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top positions in certain markets, including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi. jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea, and Yahoo! ’s Wretch. cc in Taiwan. II. Potential Facebook Addiction A. Social Networking to your Old Friends The best thing about Facebook for those of us, who have been out of school for a long time, is the ability to find old friends.When you find old friends using Facebook you're given the chance to make amends, start over and be best friends again, not to mention find lost love. B. Business Facebook â€Å"Pages† (that’s with a capital â€Å"P†) were created to give businesses their own profile on Facebook. In fact, originally, the code that made up a Facebook â€Å"Page† appeared to be almost exactly the same as that which generated user profile pages. Pages give your business or brand an identity on Facebook. With a Page, those interested and following your brand can become â€Å"fans†, and when they do so, all their friends will see this.You can store photos, videos, information about your company, and custom applications on your Page. All activity on Pages gets posted back to your Mini Feed for all your friends to see. C. Communicating to other Nation Other nations are using this site in communicating. Nowadays, chatting or having social life with other nation is a great issue. Filipinos are one of the examples in maki ng friends with the other. Foreigners are now married with the other Filipina and that because of Facebook. And also, this might be the reason why we have this unity even though we’re not that same. III. Effects of Addiction to FacebookA. Financially We are force to spend our allowance because we are enjoying using Facebook. Like in our phone, just by reloading we can now connect with Facebook. Likewise, when we do not have our computer at home, we tend to visit internet shops. Some people do have their connections at home using the Globe Broadband and paying monthly. B. Health Problems The debate rages on about how these social networking sites affect our health. Many people have made new friends or even met special mates on these social networking sites. Some studies suggest that Facebook or Twitter could actually be harmful to our social health.Instead of meeting people in person, we are spending more time in front of our computer screens checking out the latest info. I re ally do not see how anyone really cares when John goes to the bathroom or eats dinner. Some famous celebrities use facebook too and use it constantly. C. Mentally Professionals worry that these cyber interactions are a detriment to participants in that they discourage traditional human interaction. It is far easier to log onto a website and chat with friends than it is to drive to their homes to see them in person, but physical human interaction is important to one's mental well-being.Also, maintaining contact solely through cyberspace can be damaging in that it is somewhat superficial and not as meaningful as face to face conversation. Lest you forget the nuances of a smile or the meaning behind an embrace, it is best to use Facebook sparingly in maintaining interpersonal relationships. IV. Signs of Facebook Addiction A. Neglecting your Studies Based on the experiences, students find their selves alone and making fun. Simply, they are enjoying Facebook. Instead of studying, they sp end more time in this site.Telling their parents that they have a research to do but the truth is they will just log in and they will share thoughts with their friends. Technology now is part of our life. Even a seven year old girl or boy does have their Facebook now. This is the proof that Facebook has greatly influenced the life of everyone. Students cannot focus in their studies because they have the reason to enjoy surfing the internet. B. Facebook Games vs. Cultural Games Many active users are playing games in Facebook. C. Rebellion V. ConclusionVI. References http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Facebook