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Facebook Biography

Posted by Akash on 28 October 2011

We are quit familiar with Facebook. It is social networking service and Web site launched in February 2004. Facebook is the largest social network on the web. Since it's launch it is gaining enormous popularity and is has become the 2nd most popular site in the world after Google. Let us discover in-depth biography of facebook.

Foundation

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The Web site's membership was initially limited to the students of Harvard University and was later expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. We can now find that most of the internet users have their account on facebook.

thefacebook

Facebook was initially called thefacebook. It is said that thefacebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg as a hobby project which was financed by Eduardo Saverin. Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students later, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the next level. Zuckerberg and Moskovitz left Harvard to run thefacebook full time shortly after taking the site at the national level.

In August 2005, thefacebook was officially renamed to Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

Funding and Ownership

We know that it was initially financed by Eduardo Saverin but as Facebook got popular it started receiving funding from various investors and companies. Facebook received $500,000 from Peter Theil, co-founder of PayPal. A few months later, it was also able to get $13 million from Accel Partners, who are also investors in 15 other Web 2.0 startups, and $25 million from Greylock Partners, making their overall venture equal to approximately $40 million.

The ownership percentages of the company are as follows:

Mark Zuckerberg: 24%
Accel Partners: 10%
Digital Sky Technologies: 10%
Dustin Moskovitz: 6%
Eduardo Saverin: 5%
Sean Parker: 4%
Peter Thiel: 3%
Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each
Microsoft: 1.3%
And remaining to some other partners.

Lawsuits

In its early days, Facebook faced an extremely threatening lawsuit from ConnectU, a very similar social network site. Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra accused Zuckerberg of intentionally making them believe he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com (later called ConnectU). They alleged that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg stole source code while he was in their employment. They filed a lawsuit in 2004 but it was dismissed on a technicality on March 28, 2007.

Eduardo Saverin

A lawsuit was also filed by Eduardo Saverin. This was settled out of court and Saverin signed a non-disclosure contract after the settlement. Though terms of the settlement were sealed, the company affirmed that Saverin was a co-founder of Facebook.

Features and Services

Now its time to look into some of the Facebook's features. The unique features it provides is the key to it's success. This features are pretty self-explanatory. I am not going to explain all of them in details as this is not a post on Facebook features and tutorials, this is a biography. I have explained some of the important services or features of Facebook below:

Various features of Facebook are:

Chat, Friend Requests, Like Button, Messages and Inbox, Groups and Pages, News Feed, Notifications, Phone, Photos, Poke, Status updates, URL shortener, Wall, Questions, Applications, Events, Notes, Places, Videos and more..

Facebook Profiles

With time facebook has changed and so it's profile pages. Your profile page is summary of who you are, giving friends an easy way to see where you live now, where you're working and more. Profile page consists of recently tagged photos, Status, Friends, Friends in Other Networks, Photos, Notes, Groups, and The Wall.

Add Akash Shastri on Facebook.

Chat

Facebook Chat was released on April 23, 2008. Users may chat with their Facebook friends on a one-to-one basis, or a user may chat with multiple friends simultaneously through the groups feature. Now, you can also chat simultaneously with more than one friends without the need of being in a group by using Add friends to chat feature.

Photos

Ability to upload photos is one of the most popular feature of Facebook. Millions of photos are uploaded daily on Facebook. Tagging photos and photo albums are cool features which gained popularity.

Poke

Many Facebook users don't know what is poke. The poke feature is similar to "nudge" in instant messaging. It is generally used to attract the attention of another user or say "hello" to their friends. In previous version of Facebook FAQ the poke feature was described as: "When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings."

URL Shortener

On December 14, 2009, Facebook launched its own URL shortener which is based on FB.me domain name. All links based on facebook.com can be accessed after fb.me, which is seven characters shorter.

Event

Another Facebook success is their ‘events’ feature, which provides the ability to organize, be part of, and plan for events. This feature has been extremely successful when it comes to organizing parties and social meetings.

Page

Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information in an official, public manner to people who choose to connect with them. Page is a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.

Like our Facebook page: jabroo.blogspot.com.

Fb.com

Facebook acquired the domain name fb.com on November 15, 2010, from the American Farm Bureau Federation for an undisclosed amount. On January 11, 2011, the Farm Bureau disclosed $8.5 million in "domain sales income", making the acquisition of FB.com one of the ten highest domain sales in history.

Privacy

Facebook has always been criticized and remained in news because of the way it uses user information. According to a source, it collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!. In 2010, the security team began expanding its efforts to reduce the risks to users' privacy, but privacy still remains a big concern. Hackers are now targeting Facebook users as they are an easy prey to social engineering.

Conclusion

Facebook is a hugely successful social networking service which has grown in no time. It seems that future of Facebook is bright and it will continue to dominate the social network world.