Facebook


The social networking service that has settled its roots online is known as Facebook. The headquarters is settled in Menlo Park, California. On February 4th, 2004 the website was launched. Mark Zuckerberg joined with his college roommates and co-students from Harvard University to launch what is now one of the largest sites for social media today. Along with Zuckerberg were Andrew McCollum, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Dustin Moskovitz, when the site first began only students from Harvard could log in. Later the social site began to expand to Boston area colleges, Stanford University, and the Ivy League.

As the site continued to grow more and more college students were allowed access and it even branched down to students in high school. By the year 2006, anyone age 13 years or older was allowed to register and become a user of the site. In some areas the age limit may differ depending on area laws. The name of the site was derived from a directory by the various American universities.

Once a user is registered, they can then begin creating their profile and begin adding friends and family to their personal profile. Users have the ability to exchange messages, post their thoughts, activities, or feelings through a “status”. Users are allowed to post videos and photos. When others update their personal profiles, users are sent a notification.

Common-interest groups such as those that represent a particular workplace, sporting event, direct sales, school, college and more can be set up and members can be added. Users can group their own friends list by category and separate family, co-workers, and friends.

In March of 2015, over 1.44 billion users were active on the site monthly. For years as the number of users has grown, Facebook has been regularly scrutinized over their privacy policies. The company began selling stock in 2012 and held their initial public offering in February of that year. They reached their peak market of $104 billion in capitalization and have since doubled that since February of 2015.

There are many people who spend a large amount of time logged into this site. Whether it is to keep up with friends or family or to promote a business they are involved in there is no doubt that Facebook is a time eater. Hours pass quickly between all of the status updates and games that are available. It’s easy to get lost in this massive site for hours.



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