The facts
Facebook is the worlds biggest social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc which was part funded by paypal, Accel, the CIA and DARPA . As of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active users. 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. 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". 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. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The Web site'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 in 2006 eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. However, based on ConsumersReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, violating the site's terms of service.
Ownership
The ownership percentages of the company which has made revenue profits of upto $8 billion since 2006 are as follows. Mark Zuckerberg: 28.4%, 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%, Li Ka-shing: 0.75%, the Interpublic Group: less than 0.5%. A small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, Adam D'Angelo, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company. The remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors. Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.
CASE 180 - Information awareness office
Social impact
Facebook has affected the social life and activity of the worlds people, especially the developed countries in various ways. Especially with its availability on many mobile devices, Facebook allows users to continuously stay in touch with friends, relatives and other acquaintances wherever they are in the world, as long as there is access to the Internet. It can also unite people with common interests and/or beliefs through groups and other pages.
Some argue that Facebook is beneficial to one's social life because they can continuously stay in contact with their friends and relatives, while others say that it can cause increased antisocial tendencies because people are not directly communicating with each other. Some studies have named Facebook as a source of problems in relationships. Several news stories have suggested that using Facebook causes divorce and infidelity. In some ways society has become very needing and relies too much on facebook, and when a major event such as a famous persons death or sporting event occurs the whole world knows within an hour and instantly eveyone has an opinion and most people will get highly offended if people dont share your views. People will talk to you all day long on it, but in public most cant even bring them selves to look at you or say hello, People will ignor your calls, texts, emails, knocks at the door for days or even weeks, but if you write something on a persons facebook wall positive or negative or something they deem interesting or useful to them the person will do all they can to reply as soon as possible, in most cases just secounds after, in some cases kids sat in the back seat of the car, driver replying whilst driving, and it will always be followed by comments from all their friends and family, everyone knows everyones business and facebook has made it easy to do this, but myself personally I feel more disconnected from my friends and family more than ever. Its almost become the human ego, or a school playground scenario for the ego, everyone wants people to look at them and show them attention, "look at me, my possessions, my new car" or "my lifes so bad, everyone give me self pitty". There's also a space for the "advanced minds" to play, which usually means they just post up a picture or write some fantastic quote like its their own words that someone else wrote years, even centuries ago or they like to post derogative, egotistical statuses because there so intelligent or have something more than "you" , but where ever you go, what ever the subject, there's always battles between people's opinions, the society we live in has become so divided by so many catagories now and its mainly due to facebook as we come to its 1 billionth user, 1 in 7 of us.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/06/is-facebook-taking-over-the-world.html
http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112
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