Facebook

When my friends and I graduated high school, and entered our next journey in our lives (college) we didn't know if we would all stay in touch and remain friends. Some of us went to college throughout NY State others went our of state down south, others towards the west, others even left the country entirely. We promised we would all stay in touch, but could we really keep that promise?! With the invention of FaceBook, we could, and we have.

Facebook is a social networking website that is powered by facebook Inc. All a person needs to sign up for Facebook is an email address. Once you sign up for Facebook, you create your profile and include your likes, favorite movies, interests, etc. Once you've done that you need to find some of your friends and have them add to your list. Through Facebook people are allowed to search for past co-workers, friends, class mates, even family. Once a person finds the person they send them a friend request. After the friend request is accepted both people can read the others profile. They are allowed to send private messages to eachother as well as public messages on ones "wall". Also on Facebook people can provide there status update, in which you can let your friends know what your doing at that current time. I'm sure almost everyone at UB has Facebook so Im going to take a break from this and focus more on the history of Facebook.

Facebook was founded in 2004 by computer science students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, at Harvard University. When it was first created, they limited the membership only to there fellow students at their campus. Next they expanded it to other college students in the Boston area (ex. Stanford). Next limited to only college students, then they included high school students, and finally ANYONE who is 13 years of age and older. Currently there is over 300 million members. However Facebook has also been blocked in some countries including China, Syra and Iran.

Facebook also allows users to create groups and join other groups that coincide with their interest. You can join political, sports, music, or other interest groups. You join the group and talk to other fans about the particular group. Also through Facebook if you are throwing a party you can send invitations to your friends through Facebook.

Facebook is a free to individuals who sign up which begs the question, how do the founders of Facebook make money!? They use the banners ads that you see throughout the website. Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner.

This past year facebook has launched a Facebook lite version that allows users to update there status, as well as look at friends status's using there blackberry, ipod touch, iphone, and other PDA"s....

One major problem with Facebook has been there outages. In 2007 an outage resulted in hackers allowing to get on to the site and reading other peoples mail and other personal information.

Facebook is now the most popular social networking site, and should remain at the top for a while now. They have run Myspace, out of the competition and should be able to do that to anyone else that tries to compete with them.

I'm very thankful for the creation of Facebook, because with it I am able to communicate with my friends from other colleges, throughout the world as well as know what they are doing that day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

www.facebook.com