Facebook, American company offering online social networking services. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, all of whom were students at Harvard University. Facebook became the largest social network in the world, with more than one billion users as of 2012, and about half that number were using Facebook every day. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.
Access to Facebook is free of charge, and the company earns most of its money from advertisements on the Web site. New users can create profiles, upload photos, join a preexisting group, and start new groups. The site has many components, including Timeline, a space on each user’s profile page where users can post their content and friends can post messages; Status, which enables users to alert friends to their current location or situation; and News Feed, which informs users of changes to their friends’ profiles and status. Users can chat with each other and send each other private messages. Users can signal their approval of content on Facebook with the Like button, a feature that also appears on many other Web sites.The attractiveness of Facebook stems in part from cofounder Zuckerberg’s insistence from the very beginning that members be transparent about who they are; users are forbidden from adopting false identities. The company’s management argued that transparency is necessary for forming personal relationships, sharing ideas and information, and building up society as a whole. It also noted that the bottom-up, peer-to-peer connectivity among Facebook users makes it easier for businesses to connect their products with consumers.
In September 2004 TheFacebook added the Wall to a member’s online profile. This widely used feature let a user’s friends post information on their Wall and became a key element in the social aspect of the network. By the end of 2004, TheFacebook had reached one million active users. However, the company still trailed the then-leading online social network, Myspace, which boasted five million members.The year 2005 proved to be pivotal for the company. It became simply Facebook and introduced the idea of “tagging” people in photos that were posted to the site. With tags, people identified themselves and others in images that could be seen by other Facebook friends. Facebook also allowed users to upload an unlimited number of photos. In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service. By year’s end it had six million monthly active users.In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13. As Zuckerberg had predicted, advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships. For example, that year, household product manufacturer Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 people to a promotional effort by “expressing affinity” with a teeth-whitening product. This kind of direct consumer engagement on such a large scale had not been possible before Facebook, and more companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising.Privacy remains an ongoing problem for Facebook. It first became a serious issue for the company in 2006, when it introduced News Feed, which consisted of every change that a user’s friends had made to their pages. After an outcry from users, Facebook swiftly implemented privacy controls in which users could control what content appeared in News Feed. In 2007 Facebook launched a short-lived service called Beacon that let members’ friends see what products they had purchased from participating companies. It failed because members felt that it encroached on their privacy. Indeed, a survey of consumers in 2010 put Facebook in the bottom 5 percent of companies in customer satisfaction largely because of privacy concerns, and the company continues to be criticized for the complexity of its user privacy controls and for the frequent changes it makes to them.
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