Facebook, Inc.

File:Facebook logo.gif
Company type	Private
Industry	Internet
Founded	Cambridge, Massachusetts (February 4, 2004)
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California
Key people	Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz, Co-founder and CTO Owen Van Natta, COO Matt Cohler, VP Strategy & Business Operations Chris Hughes, Co-founder
Website	www.facebook.com

Facebook is a social networking service for high school, college, university, corporate, non-profit, military and geographic communities primarily in English-speaking countries. As of December 2005, it had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites (at over 7.5 million US college student accounts created with an additional 20,000 new accounts being created daily).^[1] It is the number one site for photos, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with 2.3 million photos uploaded daily^[2], and is the seventh most trafficked site in the United States, according to ComScore's MediaMetrix.

Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California. The name of the site is based on the paper facebooks that many colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community.

Operations

Anyone with a valid email address can register for and access the site. The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1 million per week^[3]). Users create personal profiles, typically containing photos and lists of interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends. According to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students in [previously] supported colleges have a profile [on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60% log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month."^[4] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited liability company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and losing only to the iPod.^[5]

History of Facebook

Origins and expansion

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The site was founded as thefacebook in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University with financial help from Eduardo Saverin. The website spread across the Harvard campus and within a few weeks, over half the undergraduate population had registered. By the end of February, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes had joined Zuckerberg to spread the website. Within two months, Facebook had expanded to other schools in the Boston area, then to students from the rest of the Ivy League and then other prominent universities. It became a network phenomenon, spreading rapidly to other schools, despite some competition from similar, local websites. By December 2004, the number of registered users exceeded one million.

As the website’s popularity rose and advertising revenue grew, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz left Harvard to run Facebook fulltime, while Hughes remained at Harvard to work as the site's spokesperson. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto in June 2004, established an office and recruited a staff of eight, including Sean Parker, Matt Cohler, and James Pereira.

Stories about Facebook became commonplace in online and print media. Simultaneously, several competitor sites appeared attempting to capture some of the limelight. While at Harvard, Zuckerberg's project competed with a project by Aaron Greenspan known as houseSYSTEM (Greenspan would later distribute his "FaceNet" as CommonRoom) ^[6]. In late 2004, the owners of the website ConnectU (Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss), another social networking website targeted towards college students, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had stolen source code intended for their website while in their employ ^[7][8].

In September 2004, Facebook received around $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners ^[9] .

In late August 2005, it was announced on the main website that the domain name facebook.com was acquired from Aboutface Corporation, and the website moved domains and dropped the "the" from the site name effective August 23, 2005. The purchase price for the domain name was $200,000 according to people familiar with this deal^{[citation needed]}. Also included in the move was a site overhaul, making profile pages more "user-friendly", according to Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg has since added more universities to Facebook (with an emphasis on forgotten schools in Canada as well as in the United States), but unlike in the past, the new schools were no longer publicized on the front page.

On September 2, 2005, deeming it the "next logical thing" to do, Zuckerberg launched a high school version of Facebook, which was originally kept totally separate from the college version. Although high school students could only join via an invitation for the first weeks, by September 17, an invitation was no longer necessary for most schools. So far, the high school Facebook has failed to achieve the same popularity as the college version. However, on February 27, 2006, Facebook began to allow college students to add high school students as friends, stating that "so many people requested it" ^[10].

By October 2005, Facebook had nearly completed its expansion to smaller universities and junior colleges throughout the United States and Canada. In addition, Facebook expanded to twenty-one universities in the United Kingdom, and added the entire Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) system in Mexico, the entire University of Puerto Rico system in Puerto Rico and the entire University of the Virgin Islands system in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

On December 11, 2005, Facebook expanded further, adding universities in Australia and New Zealand. As of December 2005, the network had expanded to include 2,000+ college and 25,000+ high school institutions across the United States, Canada, Mexico, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, including more than 11 million users worldwide ^[11].

On March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported rumors of a possible acquisition of the site. According to the article, the company declined an offer of $750 million and began asking for $2 billion ^[12]. The idea that a two-year old website started by college sophomores could sell for such a price ignited massive debate and speculation in the blogosphere.

In April 2006, Facebook acquired an additional $25 million in venture capital from Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners ^[13].

In May 2006, Facebook expanded to India (only at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs)).

In June 2006, Facebook threatened to seek costs of up to $100,000 from QuizSender.com for copyright infringement for allegedly copying the "look and feel" of Facebook's website ^{[14] [15]}.

On July 25, 2006, Facebook and iTunes began offering a promotion where members of the Apple Students group would receive a free 25 song sampler each week until September 30 in various music genres. The idea behind the promotion was to make students more familiar and enthusiastic with each service as fall classes approach ^[16].

On August 22, 2006, Facebook introduced "Facebook notes," a blogging feature that allows users to import a blog from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. Like many other blogging websites, this feature allows comments from readers.

During August 2006, Facebook expanded to a wide range of universities in Germany. Interestingly, facebook.com has not yet launched a version of its site in German. It is suspected that the sudden inclusion of German universities happened due to the success of a local, German facebook clone, StudiVZ.

Also in August 2006, Facebook expanded to high school students in Israel. Now, teenagers in Haifa, Jerusalem and Qiryat Gat are also connected.

On September 11, 2006, it was reported that Facebook would officially open to all Internet users, a move that prompted protest from current users ^[17]. Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address (see below) ^[18].

On September 22, 2006, it was revealed that Yahoo had offered $900 million for Facebook ^[19]. Within hours, Facebook users created hundreds of groups, such as [1], protesting against the possible acquisition.

On December 4, 2006, the Facebook Firefox toolbar was released and announced prominently on users' Facebook homepages.

Criticisms

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Privacy concerns

There have been some concerns expressed regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining. Theories have been written about the possible misuse of Facebook^[20] and privacy proponents have criticized the site's current privacy agreement. According to the policy, "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile." However, some features—such as AIM away-message harvesting and campus newspaper monitoring—have been dropped and Facebook has since responded to the concerns. Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done "for the CIA or any other group."^[21] However, the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy.^[22]

Another clause that some users are critical of reserves the right to sell user's data to private companies, stating "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." This concern has also been addressed by spokesman Chris Hughes who said "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."^[23] It is unclear if Facebook plans to remove that clause as well.

Facebook staff have the authority to view limited profiles in the event that the person is suspected of violating terms of service.

News Feed and Mini-Feed controversy

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On September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced two new controversial features called "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed". The first of the new features, News Feed, appears on every Facebook member's home page, displaying recent Facebook activities of a member's friends. The second feature, Mini-Feed, keeps a log of similar events on each member's profile page.^[24] Members can manually delete items from their Mini-Feed if they wish to do so.

Shortly after the new features appeared on the site, hundreds of groups were created in direct opposition to them, while a few smaller groups were created in favor of them. Members against the new features generally felt that they were an invasion of privacy or that they compromised the site layout and design.^[25] They urged for more targeted privacy controls, insisting that members should be able to choose whether to allow or disallow certain types of information about themselves to be announced on the News Feed or Mini-Feed, filter the specific types of information that they would like to receive about others on the News Feed or their Mini-Feeds, or completely opt-out of the entire News Feed and Mini-Feed system. The largest of these groups, Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook), accumulated nearly 750,000 members at its peak, which occurred just a few days after the changes.^[26]

Three days after the implementation of the new features, on September 8, 2006, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded to the criticism by issuing an apology on the Facebook Blog: "I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. Somehow we missed this point with [News Feed and Mini-]Feed, and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it." At the same time, Facebook added a set of privacy options that allow members to prevent certain events from being logged.^[27]

Some Facebook members still feel that the ability to opt-out of the entire News Feed and Mini-Feed system is necessary, as evidenced by a statement from the Students Against Facebook News Feed group, which has not yet seen a significant decline in membership. However, according to recent news articles, members have widely regarded the additional privacy options as an acceptable compromise.^[28]

Concerns of higher education faculty and administrators

On January 23, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education continued an ongoing national debate on social networks with an opinion piece written by Michael Bugeja, director of the Journalism School at Iowa State University, entitled "Facing the Facebook"^[29]. Bugeja, author of the Oxford University Press text Interpersonal Divide (2005), quoted representatives of the American Association of University Professors and colleagues in higher education to document the distraction of students' using Facebook and other social networks during class and at other venues in the wireless campus. Similarly, organizations such as the National Association of Campus Activities^[30], the Association for Education in Journalism and Communication^[31], and others have hosted seminars and presentations to discuss ramifications of students' use of Facebook and other social networking systems. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative has also released a brief pamphlet entitled "7 Things You Should Know About Facebook" aimed at higher education professionals that "describes what [Facebook] is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning."^[32].

Integration of high school users

Following the February 27, 2006 integration of the high school and college levels, some college users began creating groups critical of the decision.^[33] Users from opposite branches could only fully interact if they were friends and some separation did remain. The site also released the Limited Profile privacy settings and advised students on how to hide pictures and other features from younger siblings. However, many college users felt that the site's former exclusivity had been key to their experience.^[34] Some expressed concerns about the ability of unknown persons to create accounts on the high school version (since university addresses are not required) and use them to access the college version; by default, strangers can message and view users' friends through a simple global search. Some made predictions that the site would soon face issues with spammers, stalkers, or worse, and worried this would result in controversies similar to the bad publicity seen by MySpace.^[35]

Opening of Facebook

As of September 26, 2006 Facebook became an open network ^{[36] [37]} site, much like other social networking sites such as MySpace. Validation is via either mobile phone or a security test. Despite security measures in place ^[38], as well as user privacy settings, there has been backlash and there are several Facebook groups protesting the opening of Facebook. ^{[39] [40] [41]}

Use in investigations

The information students provide on Facebook has been used in investigations by colleges, universities, and local police. Facebook's Terms of Use specify that "the website is available for your personal, noncommercial use only", misleading some to believe that college administrators and police may not use the site for conducting investigations. However, there are settings on Facebook that allow a user to make his/her profile private (only people the user approves may see his/her profile).

Alcohol policy violations

It has become increasingly common for colleges and universities to use Facebook to investigate underage drinking and violations of dry campus policies. Students who violate these policies may be discovered through photographs of illicit drinking behavior, membership in drinking-related groups, or party information posted on the Facebook website. For example, several students at Saint Joseph's College, Indiana were stripped of leadership positions within the student body for Facebook pictures that clearly showed them drinking at parties on campus. The pictures, taken inside a dormitory, were considered proof that the students were in violation of the college's dry campus policy. A similar incident happened at Northern Kentucky University.^[42] Facebook's default privacy settings allow any user in one's network to see a full profile, including photos; however, these can be changed to restrict access.

In response to the monitoring, some students have begun to submit "red herring" party listings.^[43] In one case at The George Washington University, shown at CakeParty.org, students advertised their party and were raided by campus police. The police found only cake, no alcohol, and later claimed the dorm raid had been triggered by a noise complaint.^[44][45]

Other investigations

The United States Secret Service met with a University of Oklahoma freshman in March 2005 after he posted a joke about assassinating President Bush. However, this investigation began after a fellow OU student alerted the Secret Service to the threat and did not stem from federal monitoring of the site as some proposed.^[46]

During student government elections held in October 2005, results at the University of Missouri and the University of Pennsylvania were delayed due to early campaigning violations on Facebook.^[47][48]

Students at Fisher College have been expelled over suggesting that a campus police officer be illegally "set up" and that he "needs to be eliminated"^[49], and the posting of pictures showing the student in question dressed in drag. At the University of Mississippi, a group of students were brought before the University's Judicial Board and forced to remove a facebook group that professed their love for a professor in a sexually suggestive manner.^[50] One Miami University student was arrested after he set a composite sketch of a rape suspect as his profile picture.^[51] Others have been punished for rushing the football field at Penn State (Many "I rushed the field" groups were created after the Nittany Lion football team defeated Ohio State in October 2005, and State College Police and Pennsylvania State Police used the groups to arrest those who they believed rushed the field in violation of school policy),^[52] hate speech against gays,^[53] and harassing an instructor. ^[54]. On the other hand, University of Louisville students who had created a Facebook group to complain about a professor's teaching shortcomings helped lead to the dismissal of their targeted instructor in February of 2006, and were not punished.^[55]

Other uses of profile information

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It has been documented that some employers look at Facebook profiles of prospective employees or interns.^[56] Whether or not this practice is common is unknown, but students looking for jobs should be aware that information posted on Facebook is potentially accessible to employers with faculty or alumni accounts.^[57] It can be argued that the use of Facebook in this manner violates Facebook's terms of service, in that this would not be classed as "non-commercial use".

Information posted on the site is sometimes distributed publicly. Students who are related to politicians or other public figures have had screenshots of their profiles or photo albums taken and shared in an attempt to embarrass their relatives.^[58] After profile information was posted on Gawker and Wonkette, two popular weblogs, Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, sent the sites' publishers cease and desist notices.^[59] Also, a group calling itself Performing Politics, Inc. publicly displayed the profiles of students at Yale who had made comments about homosexuality in an effort to show evidence of homophobia at the school.^[60]

Militant members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in Britain appear to have threatened students at Oxford who support the university's proposed South Parks laboratory saying they are legitimate targets for attack. A counter-activist group called Pro-Test has warned students not to support the lab's construction on Facebook as they believe ALF is monitoring the site.^[61]

Responses

Schools block access

The University of New Mexico in October 2005 blocked access to Facebook from UNM campus computers and networks, citing unsolicited e-mails and a similar site called UNM Facebook.^[62] After a UNM user signed into Facebook from off campus, a message from Facebook said, "We are working with the UNM administration to lift the block and have explained that it was instituted based on erroneous information, but they have not yet committed to restore your access."

UNM, in a message to students who tried to access the site from the UNM network, wrote, "This site is temporarily unavailable while UNM and the site owners work out procedural issues. The site is in violation of UNM's Acceptable Computer Use Policy for abusing computing resources (e.g., spamming, trademark infringement, etc.). The site forces use of UNM credentials (e.g., NetID or email address) for non-UNM business."

Many high schools across the United States have blocked access to Facebook on all school computers after students have started anti-school groups like the notorious School Sucks group.

The Columbus Dispatch reported on June 22, 2006, that Kent State University's athletic director had planned to ban the use of Facebook by athletes and given them until August 1 to delete their accounts^[63]. On July 5, 2006, the Daily Kent Stater reported that the director reversed the decision after reviewing the privacy settings of Facebook.^{[citation needed]}

In the Spring 2006 Semester at Southeastern Louisiana University an article was published in the Lion's Roar stating that the on campus police department as well the local school administration were going to use writings, picture postings and anything else uploaded to the facebook server to allow suspensions, expulsions or any other administrative method they felt necessary in order to keep the good name of SELU. An excerpt from the article stated the Head Police Chief said that as students, their right to protection and free speech are not allowed and should be monitored while they are students at SELU.^{[citation needed]} Afterwards, many students at the school made their profiles private, deleting people they didn't actually know from their profile. In addition, the local group 0 The right to facebook....against slu was created in an effort to keep students informed of the situation within the University.

Facebook memorials

A notable ancillary effect of social networking websites, particularly Facebook, is the ability for participants to mourn publicly for a deceased individual. On Facebook, students often leave messages of sadness, grief, or hope on the individual's page, transforming it into a sort of public book of condolences. This particular phenomenon has been documented at a number of schools, including the University of St Andrews (Scotland), the University of Missouri–Kansas City,^[64] the University of Virginia,^[65] Boston University,^[66] the University of Vermont,^[67] and Brown University.^[68] According to Facebook spokesperson Chris Hughes, "In the past, we have removed profiles as soon as we were made aware of the student's death, but we are now re-evaluating the policy in light of numerous requests to the contrary from users."^[69]

Hacks

Facebook is often compared to MySpace but one main difference between the two sites is the level of customization. MySpace allows users to decorate their profile using HTML and CSS while Facebook only allows plain text. However, a number of users have tweaked their profiles by using "hacks." On February 24, 2006, a user exploited a cross-site scripting (XSS) hole on the site that enabled them to load a custom CSS file and make their profile look like a MySpace profile.^[70] This user, Chris Putnam, has since been hired as an employee of Facebook.^{[citation needed]} On April 19, 2006, a user, John Romero IV,^[71] was able to embed an iframe into their profile and load a custom off-site page featuring a streaming video and a flash game from Drawball. He has since been banned from Facebook. On March 26, 2006, a user was able to embed JavaScript in the "Hometown" field of his profile which imported his custom CSS.^[72] Facebook has since patched all found holes. The company has not discussed plans externally for user customization.

Possible sale

In 2006, with the sale of social networking site MySpace to NewsCorp, there has been talk about the possible sale of Facebook to a large media company. Zuckerberg has said that he does not want to sell the company and denies rumors to the contrary.^[73] He has already outright rejected offers in the range of $580 million, and it is not clear who might be willing to pay a higher premium for the site. Steve Rosenbush, a technology business analyst, suspects Viacom.^[74]

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo took place for the acquisition of the social network. Negotiations are underway and prices could reach as high as $1 billion. ^[75] In October, after purchasing video-sharing site YouTube, rumors circulated that Google had offered $2.3 billion to outbid Yahoo. ^[76]

See also

• Facebook's use in investigations
• List of social networking websites
• Social network service
• Wirehog

References

External links

Official website

• Facebook
  • The Official Facebook Blog
  • Pulse (public version)
  • Development Platform Products Directory

Extensions

• FaceLift Skin by StudioLD
• Greasemonkey scripts

Print media

• "College Facebook Mugs Go Online" by Rachel Metz, Wired News, June 9, 2004
• "Scoring a Hit with the Student Body" by Om Malik, Business 2.0, June 1, 2005
• "A Virtual Student Body" by David Murphy, PC Magazine, July 19, 2005
• "Facebook Stares Down Success" by Fortune Magazine, November 28, 2005
• "In Your Facebook.com" by Nancy Hass, The New York Times, January 8, 2006 (registration required)
• "Facing the Facebook" by Michael J. Bugeja, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2006 (Career Network)
• "Facebook's on the Block" by Steve Rosenbush, BusinessWeek, March 28, 2006
• "The Facebook Generation"The New Yorker, May 15, 2006

College newspapers

• "Hundreds Register for New Facebook website" (about the initial launch) by Alan J. Tabak, The Harvard Crimson (Harvard), February 9, 2004
• "Business, Casual." (about Zuckerberg) by Kevin J. Feeny, The Harvard Crimson, February 24, 2005
• "How They Got Here" (timeline) by The Harvard Crimson, February 24, 2005
• "High School Facebook" (interview with Chris Hughes) by Chris Peterson, The Virginia Informer (William and Mary), October 6, 2005
• "Employers screen applicants with Facebook" by David Linhardt, University Daily Kansan (University of Kansas), January 30, 2006
• "Death in a digital age" by Jenn Rourke, The Daily Illini (UIUC), March 9, 2006
• "Is Facebook the New Big Brother?" by Elizabeth Lauten, The East Carolinian (East Carolina University), September 6, 2006

Online media

• "Big Brother With A Smile" by Daniel Abrahamson, rense.com, June 9, 2005
• "Facebook Etiquette" by Jake Klocksien, CollegeHumor, November 2, 2005
• "Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble" by Nate Anderson, Ars Technica, January 19, 2006
• Facebook Talk about all things Facebook.
• Facebook Watch a blog about Facebook.
• Facebook Faces Privacy Complaints at Legal News TV
• Facebook research and discussion from Fred Stuzman, PhD student studying information, social networks, identity and technology

Information

• Zuckerberg's guest lecture at Stanford (video file) by Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, etl.stanford.edu, October 26, 2005
• "Ten things you didn’t know about Facebook.com" by Ryan McGeehan, personal weblog, December 30, 2005
• "'Hacking' Facebook with greasemonkey and other tips" by Sean Blanda, College v2 weblog, February 26, 2006
• Continuously updated list of news stories regarding Facebook by fstutzman, del.icio.us aggregator