The Business behind Facebook

Prior to Facebook, people had to use detective work and old fashioned stalker technology to find out what their exes and goofball best friend from third grade was up to. Those were hard times. By 2010, Facebook has inudated the earth so trouhgt that you’ll never have to rely on a shady private eye to stalk your friends and enemies again. And there are few facts about the business behind this incredible website:

[Source: Online PhD Programs]

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. with more than 500 millionactive users in July 2010. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be aged 13 or older to become a member of the website.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product produced by Zuckerberg’s prep school Phillips Exeter Academy, which for decades published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the “face book”. The website currently has more than 500 million active users worldwide.