FACEBOOK

Facebook is a social networking service launched in 2004 and was created by Mark Zuckerberg; it is privately owned and operated by Facebook Inc. Facebook was created with the intention of allowing peers and families to communicate whilst away at university, allows students to make new friends or to communicate about essays due with class mates, however since then the reasons behind the expansion of Facebook is to allow people to meet new friends.  The social networking site as of July 2011 has over 800 million active users and according to Social Media Today, in April 2010 41.6% of the United States population had a personal Facebook account. Facebook is worth approximately $15 billion, companies such as Microsoft purchased a share of 1.6% of Facebook which cost $240 million. As of April 2011, Facebook has over 2,000 employees and offices in 15 different countries.
Most of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, Microsoft is Facebook’s exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and therefore Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft’s advertisement inventory. Facebook is used for many different things depending on the user, some bands use Facebook to promote themselves, students use the site to interact with other students, generally the whole sites purpose is to allow its users to meet new people or interact with friends. Despite controversy Facebook has made many changes in an attempt to increase its privacy as pictures, personal information and contact information are shown on personal profiles, the site allows its users to communicate either privately through messaging or chat or publically using wall posts. Facebook is free to use and only makes a user’s name accessible to others, users are able to control who can search for them in privacy settings, there are regular updates made to the site offering much more privacy and features for its growing amount of consumers.
Facebook is accessible on most platforms, it can be downloaded as an application on iPhones, Blackberry’s can access the site, most mobile phones with internet either come with a Facebook application and when they don’t it’s easily accessible using 3G. Primarily Facebook is an internet social networking site but many handheld devices such as iPads and some iPods can access the website also. Facebook was originally named ‘Facemash’ and then ‘The Facebook’ created for students to communicate around Harvard University in America, however it eventually ended up being accessible by other universities in the Boston area. Finally it expanded to all universities and high schools around America for people aged thirteen and over to use, however it was discovered in May 2011 that there are 7.5 million children under the age of thirteen using Facebook, thus violated the sites terms. Facebook is globally known, there are a few countries that have banned access to the website for various reasons but it is still to this day the most used social networking site.