Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] 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 profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of a book given to incoming students at Zuckerberg's high school alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy. The book shows the faces and names of the school's students and faculty.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes 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 Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. 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 250 million active users worldwide.
Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria,[6] China[7] and Iran,[8] although Iran later unblocked Facebook in 2009.[9] It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.[10] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook 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.
Users can choose fan pages according to their interests to connect and interact with other strangers.[44] Users can set their profiles on private so as to prevent acquaintances from contacting them. Users can also set their profiles on public.[45] This allows close friends to send messages and add the user as a friend. It lets users update their personal profiles to notify their close friends about themselves. They can also join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with their close friends.[46] Public profiles also allow any stranger or acquaintance to contact the user which results in lack of privacy. Public profiles can be blocked by any user but private profiles cannot.
The website is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads.[47] Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends.[48] By default, the viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network and "reasonable community limitations".
Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising,[50] 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!.
