Facebook

Facebook (stylized facebook) is a social networking website originally available only to college students, but was soon opened up to the public at large with advertising and promotions. Users can waste their time on it in a variety of ways: by uploading pictures (typically of themselves), by gossiping about others, by interfering with marriages and personal relationships, and by acting like a busybody.

One survey conducted showed that Facebook feeds narcissistic tendencies.

Other studies done have shown that the use of Facebook is associated with poorer performance in school. Facebook use is also associated with a substantial percentage of marital problems and an increase in psychological disorders in youth. The site is heavily promoted by liberals, presumably because it is so unproductive or even counterproductive.

Anybody with an account can create an unlimited amount of unproductive pages, which can then be "liked" by other users.

Facebook is based in Palo Alto, California. The name of the site is based on the paper facebooks that many colleges give to incoming students, faculty, and staff depicting members of the campus community.

Monetary Value

It is rumored that Facebook generates around $1 million per week in revenue. In September 2006, Yahoo began talks to acquire Facebook for as high as $1 billion. In October, Google allegedly offered $2.3 billion. All outside offers have been rejected. 2009 estimates put a net value of $6.5 billion. 2010 estimates of the privately held company put the value at $14 billion dollars.

In 2011, Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in Facebook. It is speculated that Goldman Sachs may be put in charge of an initial public offering of Facebook stock in 2012. Valuations are speculated at between $10 and $50 billion.

Origins

Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Harvard sophomores Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, with help from Andrew McCollum. By December of 2004, after expanding the site to other universities, the number of registered users exceeded one million. In August 2005 Facebook obtained the domain name facebook.com and dropped the "the" from the site's name.

2010

A movie was made about the origins of Facebook, called The Social Network. The film was number one in America for several weeks. Mark Zuckerberg was not involved in the creation of film and said that it was more Hollywood storytelling than reality.

It has been known among Silicon Valley technology companies that Facebook has been luring away Google employees to the extent that Google is now offering bonuses for staying with the company. On October 15, 2010, Facebook announced the release of a new email client. Internally referred to as Titan, the media has dubbed it a "Gmail Killer". Zuckerberg insists it is not a head-to-head competitor of Google's Gmail service; rather, it will be more of a instant messaging service.

Liberal Policies

The world's largest online social network added civil unions and domestic partnerships to the list of relationships that its users can pick from to best describe their romantic status. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation had lobbied for the policy adoption and is only available to Facebook users in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France and Australia.

98% of political donations from Facebook employees went to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Privacy Issues

Facebook Privacy Policy is constantly changing. This is not for the benefit of the users but to the monetary value they represent to advertisers. Due to the size of Facebook, all kinds of data on your habits are monitored. Not just by Facebook either, the government can peek at your life and monitor you behind the scenes. Facebook claims your personal information is not for sale. They make the case that it is anonymously collected data, thereby protecting your privacy. Third parties develop applications to run on top of Facebook. Your privacy is effectively in the hands of unknown organizations. The below examples include what information is on display by every user.

• Many users post their full address, e-mail address, birthday, and telephone number, and these can be available to their entire network (and, in reality, anyone). This information in the wrong hands can be used for purposes of phishing, stalking, or even identity theft.
• Some universities have begun to use students' pages to investigate underage drinking and other violations of university policy. This is very possible, since university faculty and staff can sign up for the same network as their students through their campus e-mail account.
• The so-called "news feed" has aroused some discomfort among Facebook users, as it displays all changes and status updates from their friends by default.
• The "wall" feature allows a user to post a message to another user which remains on their profile page. This posting is viewable to everyone who can view the page, and shows up on the news feed for all friends of both the sender and the recipient by default.
• As with Google ads, Facebook collects profile information, and places ads on the page that reflect the user's personal information. This resulted in one man logging into his facebook account, and seeing his wife's photograph appear in an advertisement for a dating website.
• The privacy settings on Facebook give users a false sense of security and encourage people to post things they shouldn't. As with other social networks, Facebook refuses to admit that its privacy settings that apparently allow only "friends" to see certain information are completely bogus and can easily be cracked by people with little to no hacking experience. Instead, Facebook actually encourages young users to only allow "friends" to see certain information, rather than just warning them that what they post can be seen by the world and to not post what they wouldn't want people to see.

See Also

• Social media
• Twitter
• MySpace