Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites in the world that permits the registered users to post videos, photos, comments, and messages after creating their profiles here. It has acquired the popular ‘Mobile Messaging’ Company WhatsApp as well as Messenger and Instagram.

• Industry: The Internet, Social Media
• Founded: February 4, 2004
• Founder(s): Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollam, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes
• Headquarters: Menlo Park, California, USA
• Subsidiaries: Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus VR
• Website: facebook.com

History of Facebook

Facebook was founded on the 4th of February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard College roommates and students, Andrew McCollam, Chris Hughes Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz.

Zuckerberg had written a program known as ‘Facemash’ on the 28th of October 2000 while he was a second-year student of Harvard attending as the sophomore. Facemash was created as an online site for rating ‘photos’ as ‘hot or not.’ In the first hour of its creation, it attracted over 450 visitors and had 22, 000 photo views. Later Zuckerberg expanded his project by creating social study tools and uploaded 500 Augustan images on the website along with comments section just before his art history exam. He shared this site with classmates and helped the students in sharing notes.

The co-founders limited the membership of the website to only the Harvard students but later extended to the ‘higher education institutions’ of the Boston area that is the Stanford University and ‘Ivy League’ schools.

The co-founder, CEO, and chairmen of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg controls a majority of the voting stock of Facebook through the preferred shares. The majority of the revenue of Facebook is generated through advertising and has a low ‘clickthroughrate’ for the advertisements compared to the other major websites.

More about Facebook.com

In the month of February Facebook declared that 2,000,000 active advertisers used Facebook.

The prime color of the website is blue as the co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is green-red colour-blind. The website is built on PHP and deploys HipHop for lowering the CPU consumption by 50% on the Facebook servers.

Facebook introduced the ‘News Feed’ feature on the 6th of September 2006 that appears on the homepage of the users and highlights information that includes upcoming events, profile changes and user’s friend’s birthdays.

Facebook announced in the month of March 2017 that it would permit the users to raise funds in the categories medical, education, pet health, natural disasters, funerals, emergencies etc. It added the sports and community categories eligible for people aged 18 years and above. It introduced the ‘fundraiser’ feature within the safety check which activated during the major disasters.

The ‘like’ button of Facebook was enabled on the 9th of February 2009 to permit the users to interact with comments, updates, links, photos and the links shared by the user’s friends. On the 24th of February 2016, it introduced five emoticons ‘love, sad, wow, ha-ha and angry’ for helping viewers express these reactions on comments, status updates, and images.

Accolades:

• Top 100 Classic Websites: It won this award by the PC Magazine in the year 2007.
• People’s Voice Award: Facebook won this award in 2008 from Webby Awards.
• Best Overall Product or Startup: It won this recognition thrice in a row from Crunchie in the years 2008, 2009 and 2010.