From Saferpedia
Facebook is a social network site administered and maintained by Facebook Inc. Users can add friends, send messages, update their profile, etc.
The founders of Facebook are Mark Zuckerberg and its room mates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Huges while they were studying at Harvard University. Initially the founders allowed access to the site only to Harvard students but later they allowed other universities and colleges: Boston, Ivy League and Standford University. Later it extended to anyone over 13 years. Now Facebook has over 400 millions active users all over the world.
The original concept was borrowed from a product made by Philips Exeter Academy which for decades published and distributed a printed manual for all students in all colleges, unofficially called "face book".
Facebook had some problems: was blocked in countries like Syria, China, Vietnam and Iran; also it was banned to many work places to discourage employees to lose their time on Facebook. Another problem was privacy which was many times compromised. There was a trial regarding the copyrights of the source code won by Facebook. Also there is the dispute about selling friends and fans.
A study realized by Compete.com in January 2009 classified Facebook as being the social network most used all over the world, followed by MySpace.
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Financial
Facebook received its first investment worth 500.000 dollars in June 2004 from Peter Thiel PayPal co-founder. A year later they received another one worth 12.7 million dollars from Accel partners and then 27.5 million dollars from Greylock partners. In 2005 Facebook had a net loss of 3.63 million dollars.
In September 2007 Microsoft proposed Facebook an investment of 300 - 500 million dollars in exchange of 5% from Facebook's profits. In the same month other companies including Google expressed their interest to buy shares of Facebook.
In November 2007 Li Ka-Shing billionaire form Hong Kong invested 60 million dollars in Facebook.
In September 2009 Facebook declared profit
The website
On the site users can post profiles with photos, personal interests lists, contact information and other personal information. Users can also create or join common interests groups. Facebook allows users to make their own privacy settings and to choose who and what parts of their profile are viewable.
In August 2009, Facebook announced the development of a lite version of the site, optimized for users with slower internet connections. Facebook Lite offers less services and requests less band width.
Features
Media often compare Facebook with MySpace, but there are significant differences between these two sites. One of them is the personalization level. MySpace allows users to decorate their profile using HTML and CSS - Cascading Style Sheets while Facebook only allows plain text.
Facebook has several characteristics user can interact with. Among these are loading pictures, setting status, inform friends about their actions, etc.
Platform
The Facebook platform was launched on May 24 2007 offering a frame for software developers to create applications which will interact with base characteristics of Facebook. On the same time there was inserted a markup language called Facebook Markup Language used to personalize the aspect of the applications created by developers.
Until November 3 2007 there have been developed seven thousands applications on Facebook Platform. Each day brings a few hundred more.
Facebook on smartphones
Many smartphones offer access to Facebook services trough browsers or applications. Facebook I-Phone was launched on August 2007 and on July 2008 over 1.5 million people were using it.
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