Facebook is a social networking website that was launched on February 4, 2004
The website is owned and operated by Facebook, Inc., the parent company of the website and a privately held company.
The free-access website allows users to join one or more networks, such as a school, place of employment, or geographic region to easily connect with other people in the same network. The name of the website refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some American colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while still a student at Harvard University.
Website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, but was later expanded to include any university student, then high school students, and finally to anyone aged 13 and over.
The website has more than 64 million active users worldwide.
From September 2006 to September 2007, the website's ranking among all websites, in terms of traffic, increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa.
It is also the most popular website for uploading photos, with 14 million uploaded daily.
Due to the website's popularity, Facebook has met with some criticism and controversy in its short lifespan because of privacy concerns, the political views of its founders, and censorship issues.
Facebook users can choose to join one or more networks on the website, such as a school, place of employment, geographic region, or social group.
These networks help users to connect with other members of the same network. Users can also add friends to their profile, which allows them to see the profiles of their friends.
The website is free to users and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads
Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal 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. 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 popular thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and only being ranked lower than the iPod.
Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising.
This means that Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory, which only contains advertisements that have been pre-approved by Microsoft and have an existing agreement established between Microsoft and the advertiser. When compared to other web companies, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!. The data collected is useful to show more relevant advertisements to website visitors.
