Facebook

Facebook

Type : Private

Founded : Cambridge, Massachusetts
(February 4, 2004)
Headquarters Palo Alto, California
Dublin, Ireland (international headquarters for Europe, Africa, Middle East)
Key people Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO
Dustin Moskovitz, Co-founder
Sheryl Sandberg, COO
Matt Cohler, VP of Product Management
Chris Hughes, Co-founder
Revenue ▲ 300 million USD (2008 est.)
Net income ▼ -50 million USD (2008 est.)
Employees 700 (November 2008)[3]
Website: facebook.com
Type of site Social network service
Advertising Banner ads, Referral marketing
Registration Required
Available in Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (American), English (British), English (Pirate), Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian (bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Slovene, Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Welsh
Launched : February 2004
Current status : Active

Facebook is a social networking website launched on February 4, 2004. The free-access website is privately owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Ivy League. 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 120 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 and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to increase productivity.[8] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It 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. (wikipedia.org)