Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, and receive 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". As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users, of which 8.7% are fake. Facebook (as of 2012) has about 180 petabytes of data per year and grows by over half a petabyte every 24 hours.
In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and Jim Breyeradded $1 million of his own money. A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook 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?"Facebook eventually filed for an initial public offering on February 1, 2012; it is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Facebook Inc. began selling stock to the public and trading on the NASDAQ on May 18, 2012.Based on its 2012 income of US$5.1 billion, Facebook joined the Fortune 500 list for the first time on the list published in May 2013, being placed at position 462.
History
Pre-IPO
Zuckerberg wrote a program called Facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not and "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person"
To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied private dormitory ID images. Harvard did not have a student "Facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information) at the time, although 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,[clarification needed] but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final. He uploaded 500 Augustan images to a website, and each image was featured with a corresponding comments section. He shared the site with his classmates and people started sharing notes.
The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He said he was inspired by an editorial about the Facemash incident in The Harvard Crimson. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.
Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors (Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra) accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com. They claimed he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product. The three complained to The Harvard Crimson and the newspaper began an investigation. They later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling in 2008for 1.2m in shares (worth $300m at Facebook's IPO).
Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College; within the first month, more than half the undergraduates at Harvard were registered on the service. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to the universities of Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. It later opened to all Ivy League colleges, Boston University, New York University, the MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.
In mid-2004, entrepreneur Sean Parker (an informal advisor to Zuckerberg) became the company's president.In June 2004, Facebook moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California.[28] It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2005, the company dropped the from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com for $200,000.
A high-school version of the site was launched in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.(At the time, high-school networks required an invitation to join.) Facebook expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. On September 26, 2006, Facebook was opened to everyone at least 13 years old with a valid email address.
In late 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages (pages which allowed companies to promote themselves and attract customers). These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned.[when?]
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 adverts on the social networking site. In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash-flow positive for the first time.In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc. (an exchange for privately held companies' shares), Facebook's value was $41 billion; it slightly surpassed eBay's became the third largest American web company after Google and Amazon.com.
Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.
In March 2011, it was reported that Facebook takes approximately 20,000 profiles offline every day for infractions including spam, inappropriate content and underage use, as part of its efforts to boost cyber security.
In early 2011, Facebook announced plans to move its headquarters to the former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park, California.
Release of statistics by DoubleClick showed that Facebook reached one trillion page views in the month of June 2011, making it the most visited website tracked by DoubleClick.
According to the Nielsen Media Research study, released in December 2011, Facebook is the second most accessed website in the US (behind Google).
In March 2012, Facebook announced App Center, an store selling applications that operate via the site. The store will be available to iPhone, Android and mobile web users.
Facebook held an initial public offering on May 17, 2012, negotiating a share price of $38 apiece. The company was valued at at $104 billion, the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.
Initial public offering
Main article: Facebook IPO
Facebook filed their S1 document with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 1, 2012. The company applied for a US$5 billion initial public offering (IPO); one of the biggest in the history of technology and the biggest in Internet history. Facebook valued its stock at $38 a share which priced the company at $104 billin – the largest valuation to date for a new public company. The IPO raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. history.The shares began trading on May 18; the stock struggled to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, but set a record for the trading volume of an IPO (460 million shares).[58] The first day of trading was marred by technical glitches that prevented orders from going through;only the technical problems and artificial support from underwriters prevented the stock price from falling below the IPO price on the day.
It was revealed later[when?] that Facebook's lead underwriters, Morgan Stanley (MS), JP Morgan (JPM), and Goldman Sachs (GS) cut their earnings forecasts for the company in the middle of the IPO roadshow.[61] The stock continued its freefall in subsequent days, closing at 34.03 on May 21 and 31.00 on May 22. A 'circuit breaker' was used in an attempt to slow down the stock price's decline.[62] Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Chairman Rick Ketchum called for a review of the circumstances surrounding the IPO.[63]
Facebooks' IPO is now under investigation and has been compared to pump and dump schemes.[59][61][63][64] A class-action lawsuit was filed in May 2012 due to the trading glitches, which led to botched orders.[65][66] Apparently,[according to whom?] the glitches prevented a number of investors from selling the stock during the first day of trading while the stock price was falling – forcing them to incur bigger losses when their trades finally went through.
Lawsuits have been filed alleging that an underwriter for Morgan Stanley selectively revealed adjusted earnings estimates to preferred clients.[67] The other underwriters (MS, JPM, GS) and Facebook's CEO and board are also facing litigation.[68] It is believed that adjustments to earnings estimates were communicated to the underwriters by a Facebook financial officer, who used the information to cash out on their positions while leaving the general public with overpriced shares.[69]
By the end of May 2012, the stock lost over a quarter of its starting value, which led to the Wall Street Journal calling the IPO a "fiasco."
After IPO
In July 2012, Facebook added a gay marriage icon to its timeline feature.[71] On August 23, 2012, Facebook released an update to its iOS app (version 5.0), which changed how data was collected and displayed to make it faster. On January 15, 2013, Facebook announced Graph Search, which provides users with a "precise answer" rather than a link to an answer by leveraging the data present on its site.Facebook emphasized that the feature would be "privacy-aware," returning only results from content already shared with the user.[73] The company is the subject of a lawsuit by Rembrandt Social Media for patents involving the "Like" button.[74] On April 3, 2013, Facebook unveiled Home, a user-interface layer for Android devices offering greater integration with the site. HTC announced the HTC First, a smartphone with Home pre-loaded.[75] On April 15, 2013, Facebook announced an alliance across 19 states with the National Association of Attorneys General to provide teenagers and parents with information on tools to manage social networking profiles. On April 19, 2013, Facebook officially modified its logo to remove the faint blue line at the bottom of the "F" icon. The letter F moved closer to the edge of the box.
Following a campaign by 100 advocacy groups, Facebook agreed to update its policy on hate speech. The campaign highlighted content promoting domestic and sexual violence against women, and used over 57,000 tweets and more than 4,900 emails that caused withdrawal of advertising from the site by 15 companies, including Nissan UK, House of Burlesque and Nationwide UK. The social media website initially responded by stating that "while it may be vulgar and offensive, distasteful content on its own does not violate our policies"] It decided to take action on May 29, 2013 after it "become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate."
Mark Zuckerberg co-creator of Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, 2005.
Facebook on the Ad-tech 2010
Billboard on the Thomson Reuters building welcomes Facebook to Nasdaq, 2012.
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