facebook

Thursday, December 18, 2008

FACEBOOK HISTORY

HISTORY
Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004[9] while attending Harvard University as a sophomore.[1] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[10]
Membership was initially restricted to students of
Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service.[11] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin 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.[12] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League schools and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[13] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[12] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. [14]
Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.
[15] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.[16] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[17] Facebook was then opened to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address on September 26, 2006.[18][19]
BusinessWeek has confirmed that Facebook, beginning in Autumn 2008, will allow its employees to sell stock at no more than a $3.75 billion valuation.[20]






WHAT IS FACEBOOK

Facebook is a social networking website popular among American college students.[1] The free-access website is privately owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University.[4] Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Ivy League. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 120 million active users worldwide.[5]
Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including
Syria[6] and Iran.[7] It has also been banned at many places of work to increase productivity.[8] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.



WEBSITE

Facebook users may choose to join one or more networks, organized by city, workplace, school, and region.[34] These networks help users connect with members of the same network. Users can also connect with friends, giving them access to their friends' profiles.[35]
The website is free to users, but generates revenue from advertising. This includes
banner ads.[36] Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends.[37] The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends only when the appropriate Privacy settings have been altered. Without altering the Privacy settings a Facebook profile is viewable by anybody on Facebook.
Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving
banner advertising,[38] and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft but considerably less than Yahoo! when compared with other web companies.[39]




Funding

Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, California
Facebook received its first investment of US$500,000 in June 2004 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[21] This was followed a year later by $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners, and then $27.5 million more from Greylock Partners.[21][22] A cash flow statement was leaked, showing that during the 2005 fiscal year, Facebook had a net loss of $3.63 million.[23] Microsoft approached Facebook in September 2007, proposing an investment in return for a 5% stake in the company. Microsoft would pay an estimated $300–500 million for the share.[24] Microsoft announced on October 24, 2007 that it purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $246 million.[25] On November 30, 2007, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing invested $60 million in Facebook.[26]
BusinessWeek reported on March 28, 2006 that a potential acquisition of the website was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million from an unknown bidder, and it was rumored the asking price rose as high as $2 billion.[27] With the sale of social networking website MySpace to News Corp on July 19, 2005, rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company.[28] Zuckerberg had already said he did not want to sell the company and denied rumors to the contrary.[29] In late September, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place concerning acquisition of the social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion.[30] Thiel, by then a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation was around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to Viacom's MTV brand, a company with a shared target demographic audience.[31] Other companies, including Google, expressed interest in September 2007 to buy a portion of Facebook.[32] Amid the rumors, Zuckerberg claimed that selling Facebook was unlikely because he wanted to keep it independent, stating on July 17, 2007, "We're not really looking to sell the company. [...] We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company."[33]

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