Facebook

by NEERAJ KAUSHIK CSE

INTRODUCTION

Ø Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, owned and operated by Facebook, Inc.  

Ø As of May 2012, Facebook has over 900 million active users, more than half of them using mobile devices.

Ø  Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile.

Ø Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends".

Ø  The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other.

Ø  Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.

Ø Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

Ø The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over.

Ø However, according to a May 2011 Consumer Reports survey, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site's terms of service.

Ø A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" 

Ø Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. visitors in May 2011.According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account.Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011.

HISTORY

Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003

Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.

To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory images. Harvard at that time did not have a student "facebook” (a directory with photos and basic information), though individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online

The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, the charges were dropped.

 He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.

The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimsonabout the Facemash incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.

Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service.

 Facebook was incorporated in mid-2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The company dropped The from its name after purchasing thedomain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

 On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion. Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook. 

In March 2012 Facebook announced App Center, an online mobile store which sells applications that connect to Facebook. The store will be available to iPhone, Android and mobile web users. In April, Facebook bought the application Instagram for US$1 billion.

 After the IPO, Zuckerberg will retain a 22% ownership share in Facebook and will own 57% of the voting shares. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history. The shares began to be traded on May 18, and though the stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, it set a new record for trading volume of an IPO. Days after the IPO, regulators from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission started investigating the IPO handing, after claims that Facebook’s weakened growth forecasts were

not disclosed to all the shareholders.

TOTAL ACTIVE USERS

Date	Users (in millions)	Days later	Monthly growth[N 2]
August 26, 2008	100[28]	1,665	178.38%
April 8, 2009	200[29]	225	13.33%
September 15, 2009	300[30]	160	9.38%
February 5, 2010	400[31]	143	6.99%
July 21, 2010	500[32]	166	4.52%
January 5, 2011	600[33][N 3]	168	3.57%
May 30, 2011	700[34]	145	3.45%
September 22, 2011	800[35]	115	3.73%
April 24, 2012	900[36]	215	1.74%

FEATURES PROVIDED BY FACEBOOK

Ø      USER PROFILE

Ø      PRIVACY

Ø      NEWS FEED

Ø      MESSAGES

Ø      CHAT

Ø      VOICE CALLING

Ø      NOTES

Ø      VIDEO CALLING

Ø      APPLICATIONS

Ø      GAMING

Ø      PAGE CREATION

Ø      EVENT CREATION

TECHNICAL ASPECTS

Facebook is built in PHP which is compiled with HipHop for PHP, a source code transformer built by Facebook engineers that turns PHP into C++. The deployment of HipHop reportedly reduced average CPU consumption on Facebook servers by 50%.

Facebook is developed as one monolithic application. According to an interview in 2012 with Chuck Rossi, a build engineer at Facebook, Facebook compiles into a 1.5 GB binary blob which is then distributed to the servers using a custom BitTorrent-based release system. Rossi stated that it takes approximately 15 minutes to build and 15 minutes to release to the servers. The build and release process is zero downtime and new changes to Facebook are rolled out daily.

FACEBOOK HOMEPAGE

WWW.FACEBOOK.COM