Related topics: social networking , twitter , myspace , users , social networking sites
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
Microsoft websites top spots in September: comScore
Nov 07, 2009 |
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Industry tracker comScore on Friday released a study showing that Internet users in September spent more time at Microsoft websites that at any other online properties.
Social networking meets ambient intelligence (w/ Video)
Technology / Computer Sciences
Nov 04, 2009 |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Sharing small snippets of information about your daily life is a key feature of the online social networking revolution. Soon status updates and other social information could be generated automatically.
Study: Internet use leads to more diverse networks
Other Sciences / Social Sciences
Nov 04, 2009 |
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(AP) -- A new study confirms what your 130 Facebook friends and scores of Twitter followers may have already told you: The Internet and mobile phones are not linked to social isolation.
Experts meet to hash out web privacy rules
Nov 04, 2009 |
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Hundreds of privacy experts from around the world met in Madrid on Wednesday for a three-day conference which aims to arrive at a global standard for the protection of personal data.
Microsoft redesigns MSN, adds Twitter, Facebook
Nov 04, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Microsoft Corp. is giving its MSN Web portal a long-overdue makeover and says it hopes the new site will funnel more people to Bing, the software maker's search engine.
Internet believers: Pastors open online churches
Nov 02, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Church volunteers greet visitors entering the lobby. The worship band begins its set and a pastor offers to pray privately with anyone during the service.
Web marketer ordered to pay Facebook $711M damages
Oct 30, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Facebook said Thursday a California court has awarded the social networking Web site $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace.
Republicans to whip up support with Blackberry app
Oct 29, 2009 |
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The Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives unveiled a free application for the Blackberry on Thursday to keep users up to date on the latest in Congress through their cellphones.
Facebook outlines new privacy policy
Oct 29, 2009 |
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Facebook outlined changes to its privacy policy on Thursday and asked for feedback from the social network's more than 300 million users.
Engineers use song-annotating algorithms to study music playlists (w/ Video)
Technology / Computer Sciences
Oct 27, 2009 |
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Electrical engineers recently pitted Genius - the music recommendation system in Apple's iTunes - against two experimental music recommender systems. Genius appears to capture acoustic similarities among songs ...
Facebook to keep profiles of the dead
Oct 27, 2009 |
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(AP) -- Death doesn't erase the online footprints that people leave in life and Facebook won't either, though it will make some changes.
Facebook for scientists: Map your expertise
Technology / Computer Sciences
Oct 27, 2009 |
4 / 5 (1) |
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Indiana University has received more than $1.8 million from the National Institutes of Health to collaborate on a $12.2 million, seven-university project designed to network researchers around ...
Facebook users protest home page changes
Oct 27, 2009 |
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Legions of Facebook users united in protest, demanding that the world's most popular social-networking service undo recent changes to its home page.
Lala.com gets in tune with Facebook gift shop
Oct 26, 2009 |
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Facebook on Monday continued phasing Lala.com music service into its online shop, providing US users a way to buy music at the leading social networking service.
Six net neutrality principles proposed
Oct 26, 2009 |
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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. voted last week to start a process to formulate rules that could force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to uphold six principles that would preserve ...
