Related topics: social networking , twitter , myspace , social networking sites , google
Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of a book given to incoming students at Zuckerberg's high school alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy. The book shows the faces and names of the school's students and faculty.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later 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 250 million active users worldwide.
Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria, China and Iran, although Iran later unblocked Facebook in 2009. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.
A February 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.
For more information about Facebook, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
News tagged with facebook
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Google gives Gmail social-networking 'Buzz' (Update)
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MySpace Music experiments with audio ads
Feb 08, 2010 |
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Facebook gets more Bing -- and control of display ads
Feb 05, 2010 |
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Microsoft said Friday that Bing will power Internet searches for Facebook's 400 million members in an arrangement that returns control of display advertising to the social-networking service.
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An Australian nun has taken to Twitter on behalf of saint-in-waiting Mary MacKillop, bringing the late sister's messages of hope and forgiveness to a new audience a century after she died.
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Feb 05, 2010 |
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Electronics / Consumer & Gadgets
Feb 03, 2010 |
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(AP) -- Verizon Wireless has a second handset from Motorola Inc. that uses Google Inc.'s Android software: The Devour.
Data defenders: Researchers try to ward off increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks
Technology / Computer Sciences
Feb 02, 2010 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Cyber attackers were busy last year. In July, a coordinated "denial of service" assault was launched on computers at the White House, Federal Trade Commission and departments of Treasury, ...
Senator seeks information on tech firms in China
Feb 02, 2010 |
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(AP) -- A top Senate Democrat is asking 30 leading technology, Internet and communications companies to provide detailed descriptions of their operations and human rights practices in China.
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Feb 02, 2010 |
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(AP) -- When a gang member was released from jail soon after his arrest for selling methamphetamine, friends and associates assumed he had cut a deal with authorities and become a police informant.
'Alarming' rise in cyberattacks at social networks: Sophos
Feb 01, 2010 |
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Rewriting European privacy law for digital age
Jan 31, 2010 |
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European legislation covering the protection of private data is being dragged into the digital age in a potential threat for social networking sites like Facebook where users display foibles, often without ...
Canada privacy office launches new Facebook probe
Jan 27, 2010 |
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(AP) -- Canada's privacy commissioner is once again probing Facebook over the online social network's privacy policies.
After 150, Facebook friends are meaningless
Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
Jan 27, 2010 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- According to Oxford University's professor of evolutionary anthropology, Robin Dunbar, after you have amassed 150 friends on Facebook, any more are meaningless because the human brain can ...
