Facebook is a
social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.
[1] As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users.
[6] Users must register before using the site, after which they 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, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends". The name of the service stems from the
colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.
[7] Facebook was founded by
Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students
Eduardo Saverin,
Dustin Moskovitz and
Chris Hughes.
[8] The Web site'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 eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms of service.
[9]A January 2009
Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.
[10] Entertainment Weekly included 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?"
[11] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011.
[12] According to
Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.
[13] Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.
[14]Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, 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".
[15][16]To accomplish this, Zuckerberg
hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory
ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student "
facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information). Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.
[15][17]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.
[18] 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 Web site, with one image per page along with a comment section.
[17] He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new Web site in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in
The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.
[19] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
[20]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.
[21] The three complained to the
Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.
[22]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.
[23] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects),
Dustin Moskovitz (programmer),
Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and
Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the Web site. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to
Stanford,
Columbia, and
Yale.
[24] It soon opened to the other
Ivy League schools,
Boston University,
New York University,
MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.
[25][26]Facebook was
incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur
Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.
[27] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to
Palo Alto, California.
[24] It received its first investment later that month from
PayPal co-founder
Peter Thiel.
[28] The company dropped
The from its name after purchasing the
domain namefacebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.
[29]
|
Total active users[N 1]
| August 26, 2008 | 100[30] | 1,665 | 178.38% |
| April 8, 2009 | 200[31] | 225 | 13.33% |
| September 15, 2009 | 300[32] | 160 | 9.38% |
| February 5, 2010 | 400[33] | 143 | 6.99% |
| July 21, 2010 | 500[34] | 166 | 4.52% |
| January 5, 2011 | 600[35][N 3] | 168 | 3.57% |
| May 30, 2011 | 700[36] | 145 | 3.45% |
| September 22, 2011 | 800[37] | 115 | 3.73% |
Facebook launched a high-school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.
[38] At that time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.
[39] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including
Apple Inc. and
Microsoft.
[40] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid
email address.
[41][42]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.
[43] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.
[44] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in
Dublin, Ireland.
[45] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.
[46] In November 2010, based on
SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares of privately held companies, Facebook's value was $41 billion (slightly surpassing
eBay's) and it became the third largest U.S. Web company after
Google and
Amazon.
[47] Facebook has been identified as a possible candidate for an
IPO by 2013.
[48] The Wall Street Journalhas reported that Facebook is looking to raise as much as $10 billion in its IPO.
[49][50]Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.
[51]In March 2011 it was reported that Facebook removes approximately 20,000 profiles from the site every day for various infractions, including spam, inappropriate content and underage use, as part of its efforts to boost cyber security.
[52]Release of statistics by
DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion pageviews in the month of June 2011, making it the most visited Web site in the world.
[55] It should however be noted that
Google and some of its selected Web sites are not counted in the DoubleClick rankings.
Company
Ownership
The ownership percentages of the company are
[when?] as follows. Mark Zuckerberg: 24%,
Accel Partners: 10%,
Digital Sky Technologies: 10%,
[56] Dustin Moskovitz: 6%,
Eduardo Saverin: 5%,
Sean Parker: 4%,
Peter Thiel: 3%,
Greylock Partners and
Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each,
Microsoft: 1.3%,
Li Ka-shing: 0.75%, the
Interpublic Group: less than 0.5%. A small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including
Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild,
Adam D'Angelo,
Chris Hughes, and
Owen Van Natta, while
Reid Hoffmanand
Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company. The remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors.
[57] Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.
[58]Management
Key management personnel comprise Chris Cox (VP of Product), Sheryl Sandberg (COO), and
Donald E. Graham (Chairman). As of April 2011, Facebook has over 2,000 employees, and offices in 15 countries.
[59]Revenue
|
Revenues
(estimated, in millions US$)
| 2006 | $52[63] | — |
| 2007 | $150[64] | 188% |
| 2008 | $280[65] | 87% |
| 2009 | $775[66] | 177% |
| 2010 | $2,000[67] | 158% |
| 2011 | $4,270[68] | 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,
[69] 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),
[70] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).
[71]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.
[72] 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. According to BizReport.com, Facebook's low CTR is because Facebook users are more technologically savvy and therefore use
ad blocking software to hide advertisements, users are younger and therefore better at ignoring advertising messages, users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements.
[73]On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.
[74] Involver, a social marketing platform, announced in July 2008 that it managed to attain a CTR of 0.7% on Facebook (over 10 times the typical CTR for Facebook ad campaigns) for its first client,
Serena Software, managing to convert 1.1 million views into 8,000 visitors to their Web site.
[75] 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.
[76]Mergers and acquisitions
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.
[77]Menlo Park Executive Offices
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move to its new headquarters, the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.
[53]Operations
Website
Facebook "Timeline" profile shown in November 2011
Facebook profile shown in 2007
Profile shown on Thefacebook in 2005
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.
[79]To allay concerns about privacy, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile.
[80] The Web site is free to users, and generates revenue from advertising, such as
banner ads.
[81] Facebook requires a user's name and profile picture (if applicable) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings.
[82]The media often compares Facebook to
MySpace, but one significant difference between the two Web sites is the level of customization.
[83] Another difference is Facebook's requirement that users give their true identity, a demand that MySpace does not make.
[84] MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using
HTML and
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook allows only
plain text.
[85] 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;
[86]Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked);
[87] Photos, where users can upload albums and photos;
[88] and
Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions.
[89] 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.
[86]On September 6, 2006, a
News Feed was announced, which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends.
[90] This enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause.
[91] Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, others were concerned that it made it too easy for others to track individual activities (such as relationship status changes, events, and conversations with other users).
[92]In response, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent user-set categories of friends from seeing updates about certain types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.
[93]On February 23, 2010, Facebook was granted a patent
[94] on certain aspects of its News Feed. The patent covers News Feeds in which links are provided so that one user can participate in the same activity of another user.
[95] The patent may encourage Facebook to pursue action against Web sites that violate its patent, which may potentially include Web sites such as
Twitter.
[96]One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the
Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos.
[97] Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other
image hosting services such as
Photobucketand
Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. As of May 2009, this limit has been increased to 200 photos per album.
[98][99][100][101]Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user's friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to "
tag", or label, users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.
[102]Facebook Notes was introduced on August 22, 2006, a blogging feature that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs from
Xanga,
LiveJournal,
Blogger, and other blogging services.
[41] During the week of April 7, 2008, Facebook released a
Comet-based
[103] instant messaging application called "Chat" to several networks,
[104] which allows users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-based
instant messengers.
Facebook launched
Gifts on February 8, 2007, which allows users to send virtual gifts to their friends that appear on the recipient's profile. Gifts cost $1.00 each to purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to each gift.
[105][106] On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched
Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads.
[107]Marketplace has been compared to
Craigslist by
CNET, which points out that the major difference between the two is that listings posted by a user on Marketplace are seen only by users in the same network as that user, whereas listings posted on Craigslist can be seen by anyone.
[108]On July 20, 2008, Facebook introduced "Facebook Beta", a significant redesign of its user interface on selected networks. The Mini-Feed and Wall were consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections, and an effort was made to create a "cleaner" look.
[109] After initially giving users a choice to switch, Facebook began migrating all users to the new version starting in September 2008.
[110] On December 11, 2008, it was announced that Facebook was testing a simpler signup process.
[111]On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service. In a media event that day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it's not email". The launch of such a feature had been anticipated for some time before the announcement, with some calling it a "Gmail killer". The system, to be available to all of the Web site's users, combines
text messaging,
instant messaging,
emails, and regular messages, and will include privacy settings similar to those of other Facebook services. Codenamed "Project Titan", Facebook Messages took 15 months to develop.
[113][114]In February 2011, Facebook began to use the
hCalendar microformat to mark up events, and the
hCard microformat for the events' venues, enabling the extraction of details to users' own calendar or mapping applications.
[115]Since April 2011 Facebook users have had the ability to make live voice calls via Facebook Chat, allowing users to chat with others from all over the world. This feature, which is provided free through T-Mobile's new Bobsled service, lets the user add voice to the current Facebook Chat as well as leave voice messages on Facebook.
[116]On July 6, 2011, Facebook launched its video calling services using Skype as its technology partner. It allows one to one calling using a Skype Rest API.
[117]On September 14, 2011, Facebook launched a Subscribe button. The feature allows for users to follow public updates, and these are the people most often broadcasting their ideas.
[118] There were major modifications that the site released on September 22, 2011.
[119]Functionality issues
As of December 2011, users with computers that use the
PowerPC G5 processor are not able to view
Flash content from within Facebook as it requires the latest upgrade of Adobe Flash player which is not compatible with this particular processor architecture. Due to this issue, video content hosted on Facebook can no longer be played on devices using the G5 processor.
Privacy
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!.
[120] In 2010, the security team began expanding its efforts to reduce the risks to users'
privacy,
[121] but
privacy concerns remain. On November 6, 2007, Facebook launched
Facebook Beacon, which was an ultimately failed attempt to advertise to friends of users using the knowledge of what purchases friends made.
FTC Settlement
On November 29, 2011, Facebook agreed to settle US
Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by failing to keep privacy promises.
[122]Reception
Facebook popularity. Active users of Facebook increased from just a million in 2004 to over 750 million in 2011.
[123]According to
comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor
MySpace in April 2008.
[124] ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 130 million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of 8.6 million people.
[125] According to
Alexa, the Web site's ranking among all Web sites increased from 60th to 7th in worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 2nd.
[126] Quantcast ranks the Web site 2nd in the U.S. in traffic,
[127] and
Compete.com ranks it 2nd in the U.S.
[128] The Web site is the most popular for uploading photos, with 50 billion uploaded cumulatively.
[129] In 2010,
Sophos's "Security Threat Report 2010" polled over 500 firms, 60% of which responded that they believed that Facebook was the social network that posed the biggest threat to security, well ahead of MySpace, Twitter, and
LinkedIn.
[121]Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several
English-speaking countries, including
Canada,
[130] the United Kingdom,
[131] and the
United States.
[132][133][134][135] In regional Internet markets, Facebook penetration is highest in North America (69 percent), followed by Middle East-Africa (67 percent), Latin America (58 percent), Europe (57 percent), and Asia-Pacific (17 percent).
[136]The Web site has won awards such as placement into the "Top 100 Classic Websites" by
PC Magazine in 2007,
[137] and winning the "People's Voice Award" from the
Webby Awards in 2008.
[138] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a
New Jersey-based company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named the second most popular thing among undergraduates, tied with
beer and only ranked lower than the
iPod.
[139]On March 2010, Judge Richard Seeborg issued an order approving the class settlement in
Lane v. Facebook, Inc., the class action lawsuit arising out of Facebook's Beacon program.
In 2010, Facebook won the
Crunchie "Best Overall Startup Or Product" for the third year in a row
[140] and was recognized as one of the "Hottest
Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.
[141] However, in a July 2010 survey performed by the
American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook received a score of 64 out of 100, placing it in the bottom 5% of all private-sector companies in terms of customer satisfaction, alongside industries such as the
IRS e-file system,
airlines, and
cable companies. The reasons why Facebook scored so poorly include privacy problems, frequent changes to the Web site's interface, the results returned by the News Feed, and spam.
[142]In December 2008, the
Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid
protocol to serve court notices to defendants. It is believed to be the world's first legal judgement that defines a
summons posted on Facebook as legally binding.
[143] In March 2009, the New Zealand High Court associate justice David Gendall allowed for the serving of legal papers on Craig Axe by the company Axe Market Garden via Facebook.
[144][145] Employers (such as
Virgin Atlantic Airways) have also used Facebook as a means to keep tabs on their employees and have even been known to fire them over posts they have made.
[146]By 2005, the use of Facebook had already become so ubiquitous that the generic verb "facebooking" had come into use to describe the process of browsing others' profiles or updating one's own.
[147] In 2008,
Collins English Dictionary declared "Facebook" as its new Word of the Year.
[148] In December 2009, the
New Oxford American Dictionary declared its word of the year to be the verb "
unfriend", defined as "To remove someone as a '
friend' on a
social networking site such as Facebook. As in, 'I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.'"
[149]In April 2010, according to
The New York Times, countries with the most Facebook users were the United States, the United Kingdom, and
Indonesia.
[150] Indonesia has become the country with the second largest number of Facebook users, after the United States, with 24 million users, or 10% of Indonesia's population.
[151] Also in early 2010,
Openbook was established, an avowed
parody (and privacy advocacy) Web site
[152] that enables text-based searches of those Wall posts that are available to "Everyone", i.e. to everyone on the Internet.
Writers for
The Wall Street Journal found in 2010 that Facebook apps were transmitting identifying information to "dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies". The apps used an
HTTP referrer which exposed the user's identity and sometimes their friends'. Facebook said, "We have taken immediate action to disable all applications that violate our terms".
[153]Criticism
Facebook has met with
controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's Republic of China,
[154]Vietnam,
[155] Iran,
[156] Uzbekistan,
[157] Pakistan,
[158] Syria,
[159] and Bangladesh on different bases. For example, it was banned in many countries of the world on the basis of allowed content judged as anti-Islamic and containing religious discrimination. It has also been banned at many workplaces to prevent employees from using it during work hours.
[160] The
privacy of Facebook users has also been an issue, and the safety of user accounts has been compromised several times. Facebook has settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.
[161] In May 2011 emails were sent to journalists and bloggers making critical allegations about Google's privacy policies; however it was later discovered that the anti-Google campaign, conducted by PR giant Burson-Marsteller, was paid for by Facebook in what CNN referred to as "a new level skullduggery" and which Daily Beast called a "clumsy smear".
[162]In July 2011 German authorities began to discuss the prohibition of events organized on Facebook. The decision is based on several cases of overcrowding by people not originally invited.
[163][164] 1600 "guests" attended the 16th birthday party for a Hamburg girl who accidentally posted the invitation of the event as public. After reports of overcrowding, more than a hundred police were deployed for crowd control. A policeman was injured and eleven participants were arrested for assault, property damage and resistance to authorities.
[165] In another unexpected event with overcrowding, 41 young people were arrested and at least 16 injured.
[166]In May 2011,
HCL Technologies announced that approximately 50% of British employers had banned Facebook from the work place.
[167]A 2011 study by Internet scholars danah boyd, Eszther Hargittai, Jason Schultz and John Palfrey in the online journal
First Monday, "Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act," examines how parents consistently enable children as young as 10 years old to sign up for accounts, directly violating Facebook's policy banning young visitors. This policy technically allows Facebook to avoid conflicts with the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), requiring that minors aged 13 or younger gain explicit parental consent to access commercial websites. Of the more than 1,000 households surveyed for the study, more than three-quarters (76%) of parents reported that their child joined Facebook when she was younger than 13, the minimum age in the site's terms of service. The study notes that, in response to widespread reports of underage users, a Facebook executive has said that "Facebook removes 20,000 people a day, people who are underage." The study's authors also note, "Indeed, Facebook takes various measures both to restrict access to children and delete their accounts if they join." The findings of the study raise questions primarily about the shortcomings of federal law, but also implicitly continue to raise questions about whether or not Facebook does enough to publicize its terms of service with respect to minors. Only 53% of parents said they were aware that Facebook has a minimum signup age; 35% of these parents believe that the minimum age is a site recommendation (not a condition of site use), or thought the signup age was 16 or 18, and not 13.
[168]In November 2011, several Facebook users reported that their accounts were hacked and their profile pictures were replaced with pornographic images. For more than a week, users' news feeds were spammed with pornographic, violent and sexual contents. It has been reported that more than 200,000 accounts in
Bangalore,
India were hacked. However, Facebook has denied the claims, citing that "safety of the users was on the top of their priority list".
[169][170]Impact
Media impact
In April 2011, Facebook launched a new portal for marketers and creative agencies to help them develop brand promotions on Facebook.
[171]The company began its push by inviting a select group of British advertising leaders to meet Facebook's top executives at an "influencers' summit" in February 2010. Facebook has now been involved in campaigns for
True Blood,
American Idol, and
Top Gear.
[172]Social impact
Facebook has affected the social life and activity of people in various ways. Especially with its availability on many mobile devices, Facebook allows users to continuously stay in touch with friends, relatives and other acquaintances wherever they are in the world, as long as there is access to the Internet. It can also unite people with common interests and/or beliefs through groups and other pages, and has been known to reunite lost family members and friends. One such reunion was between John Watson and the daughter he had been seeking for 20 years. They met after Watson found her Facebook profile.
[173] Another father-daughter reunion was between Tony Macnauton and Frances Simpson, who had not seen each other for nearly 48 years.
[174]Some argue that Facebook is beneficial to one's social life because they can continuously stay in contact with their friends and relatives, while others say that it can cause increased antisocial tendencies because people are not directly communicating with each other. Some studies have named Facebook as a source of problems in relationships. Several news stories have suggested that using Facebook causes
divorce and
infidelity, but the claims have been questioned and refuted by other commentators.
[175][176]Political impact
Facebook's role in the American political process was demonstrated in January 2008, shortly before the
New Hampshire primary, when Facebook teamed up with
ABC and
Saint Anselm College to allow users to give live feedback about the "back to back" January 5 Republican and Democratic debates.
[177][178][179] Charles Gibson moderated both debates, held at the Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College. Facebook users took part in debate groups organized around specific topics, register to vote, and message questions.
[180]Over a million people installed the Facebook application "US politics" in order to take part, and the application measured users' responses to specific comments made by the debating candidates.
[181] This debate showed the broader community what many young students had already experienced: Facebook was a popular and powerful new way to interact and voice opinions. An article by Michelle Sullivan of Uwire.com illustrates how the "facebook effect" has affected youth voting rates, support by youth of political candidates, and general involvement by the youth population in the 2008 election.
[182]In February 2008, a Facebook group called "One Million Voices Against FARC" organized an event in which hundreds of thousands of Colombians marched in protest against the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC (from the group's Spanish name).
[183] In August 2010, one of North Korea's official government Web sites and the official news agency of the country,
Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook.
[184]In 2010 an English director of public health, whose staff was researching
syphilis, linked and attributed a rise in cases of the disease in areas of Britain to Facebook. The reports of this research were rebuked by Facebook as "ignoring the difference between
correlation and
causation".
[185]In 2011 a controversial ruling by French government to uphold a 1992 decree which stipulates that commercial enterprises should not be promoted on news programs. President Nicolas Sarkozy's colleagues have agreed has said that it will enforce a law so that the words "Facebook" will not be allowed to be spoken on the television or on the radio.
[186]In 2011, Facebook filed paperwork with the
Federal Election Commission to form a
political action committee under the name
FB PAC.
[187] In an email to
The Hill, a spokesman for Facebook said "FB PAC will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."
[188]In popular culture
- At age 102, Ivy Bean of Bradford, England joined Facebook in 2008, making her one of the oldest people ever on Facebook. An inspiration to other residents of the care home in which she lived,[189] she quickly became more widely known and several fan pages were made in her honor. She visited Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, in Downing Street early in 2010.[190] Some time after creating her Facebook page, Bean joined Twitter, when she passed the maximum number of friends allowed by Facebook. She became the oldest person to ever use the Twitter Web site. At the time of her death in July 2010, she had 4,962 friends on Facebook and more than 56,000 followers on Twitter. Her death was widely reported in the media and she received tributes from several notable media personalities.[191]
- "FriendFace", a December 2008 episode of the British sitcom, The IT Crowd, parodied Facebook and social networking sites in general.[192]
- American author Ben Mezrich published a book in July 2009 about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, titled The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.[193]
- In response to the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day controversy and the ban of the Web site in Pakistan, an Islamic version of the Web site was created, called MillatFacebook.[194]
- "You Have 0 Friends", an April 2010 episode of the American animated comedy series, South Park, parodied Facebook.[195]
- The Social Network, a drama film directed by David Fincher about the founding of Facebook, was released October 1, 2010.[196] The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake asSean Parker, and Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The film was written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book. The film was distributed by Columbia Pictures. No staff members of Facebook, including Zuckerberg, were involved with the project. However, one of Facebook's co-founders, Eduardo Saverin, was a consultant for Mezrich's book. Mark Zuckerberg has said that The Social Network is inaccurate.[197]
- On September 10, 2010 This American Life aired their Right to Remain Silent episode. It featured a story about Joe Lipari using a quote from Fight Club as his Facebook status and being arrested on suspicions of terrorism.[198]
- On February 22, 2011, an Egyptian baby was named "Facebook" to commemorate the vital role Facebook and other social media played in Egypt's revolution.[199]
- On May 16, 2011, an Israeli couple named their daughter after the Facebook "like" feature. They explained that it wasn't to advertise for Facebook, but because they fancied the meaning behind the word.[200][201]
US$ 4.27 
2 (January 2012)
