Facebook: From University Test to the World Connect
While Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard University, he started building facebook inside the dorm room just for fun. It was on February 4, 2004 and he took the help of his roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris. Initially the website’s membership was limited to Harvard students, later it was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. After which it expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 350 million active users worldwide.
Facebook’s growth was not so smooth though. It met with some controversy and it has been blocked in several countries including Syria, China, Vietnam and Iran. It was also banned in many companies since the employees were wasting so much of time using this service. Privacy was another issue that facebook faced several times. It stood firmly against all these adverse conditions and came up with lots of friends and fans all over the world.
Now, it is the second most visited website and the first place goes to almighty Google and a January Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users.
We have seen the initial days of Facebook. Now let’s see how it moved further. Zuckerberg moved to Palo Alto, California, with Moskovitz and some friends. They had to take a house on lease in order to start an office. During that time he met Peter Thiel who was interested in investing in the company and they finally started their office during the summer of 2004. They were planning to go back to Harvard in the fall but that did not happen.
Years later, on May 24, 2007, Zuckerberg announced a Facebook Platform, a development platform for programmers to create social applications within Facebook. This announcement sparked a great deal of interest in the developer community. Within weeks, many applications had been built and some already had millions of users. Today, there are more than 800,000 developers around the world building applications for Facebook Platform.
Getting connected with the friends is not the only thing we can do with Facebook. It has expanded the horizon.
Building a Facebook profile is really a very simple task. The Facebook profile consists of a number of different sections, including Information, Status, Friends, and Friends in Other Networks, Photos, Notes, Groups, and The Wall. Most of the sections are self-explanatory but some are specific to Facebook.
Uploading photos is yet another interesting thing we can do in Facebook and we can do photo tagging too. Over 1.5 million photos are getting uploaded by its users daily and what makes Facebook different from few other services is the permission to upload unlimited photos that too can be done through cellphone or even through Java-based web interface. It doesn’t put any restriction on the number of photos that can be uploaded in an album. This is noted as the best feature by Facebook’s college demographic.
Joining in various groups is real fun and that is the way we get connected with more friends. We can find many groups and choose one or more in which we are interested. Any user can start a group and invite others to join their group. It’s seen that majority of the groups are fun related. Finding the people of similar interest is the very good aspect of these kinds of groups.
Facebook is a good tool for marketers since they can reach about 200 million people. Getting a Facebook page is a must for them. Using Facebook Page, a company or an individual can easily get in touch with many users around the globe. If used properly, such pages can easily be a mini website for the company or individual. Communicating at no cost is the wonderful thing which attracts the marketers. They can promote events through Facebook, through message they can reach out to millions and spending some money on putting advertisements can help them in getting more traffic to their website.
During these times Facebook was facing some issues on its privacy policy and in last November it has come up with new set of privacy policies and the removal of more complicated technical and legal terms was the first change that it has brought. It is now replaced with simpler language which everyone can understand.
These types of moves gained more popularity for Facebook. Privacy settings of Facebook also changed recently and almost everyone was confused and they started thinking “whether it’s a right move”? Since Facebook was setting the default option as ‘Everyone’ and making you share your information with everyone on the internet. So even if you do not like you personal information to go beyond your friends on Facebook, you have little or no control in stopping it from going public.
Inspite of all these it was gaining more and more popularity every day and today, it’s among the most popular Web property in the U.S. It even beat AOL and grabbed the fourth position after Google Yahoo! and Microsoft. It has reached the 100 Million unique visit mark in US which is really appreciable.
It really had a tremendous increase in popularity in last few years and now, it’s just few positions after Google. When it started in 2004, Zuckerberg might not have even thought about making it the mostly visited site.
Hats off to Zuck and team. They are incredible. Now it’s almost sure that on one day it will even beat up the almighty Google!
Tags: Facebook, Facebook History, Facebook.com
lucky guy(-: