Facebook (formerly [thefacebook]) is an online social networking service. Its name comes from a colloquialism for the directory given to students at some American universities. Facebook was founded in 2004. The founders had initially limited the website’s membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to their high-school students. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old worldwide to become a registered user of the website, although proof is not required.
Users create a personal profile, add other users as friends, exchange messages, post status updates and photos, and receive notifications when others update their profiles. 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”. Facebook had over one billion active users as of September 2012 (of which approximately 9% were fake). Facebook held its initial public offering in 2012 and reached a peak market capitalization of $104 billion.
MIT wants prospective students to know that it’s fully aboard the drone bandwagon, parlaying an army of delivery drones (and computer-generated imagery) for a tongue-in-cheek admissions video, complete with Wagnerian orchestration. MIT sends… Read more »
As far as founders go, the Yik Yak fellas are some of the quietest. Georgia-based Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll stayed out of the Silicon Valley limelight during the early days… Read more »
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Facebook Pages may lose some of their likes soon. Thursday the company warned businesses it’s removing likes from deactivated or memorialized accounts. The like dip would be more of an ego hit for companies… Read more »
Apartment-sharing startup Airbnb has open sourced a tool called Airpal that the company built to give more of its employees access to the data they need for their jobs. Airpal is built… Read more »
While Oculus is still “baby stepping” out its app store for the Samsung Gear VR, Oculus CTO John Carmack said the company plans to do a broad release of the virtual reality… Read more »
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The FCC’s landmark decision on net neutrality has produced all sorts of speculation about the degree to which well-known tech giants shaped the outcome. Gawker, for instance, claimed that Americans can thank a benevolent Facebook-Google cabal for the… Read more »
AT&T hit a nerve with its privacy-eroding Internet Preferences Plan, which lets customers surf the web at gigabit speeds but also lets the telecom giant see what sites they visit in order to serve… Read more »
Federal Communications Chairman Tom Wheeler said on Tuesday that he doesn’t put much credibility in claims that U.S. carriers would stop investing in their networks in his new era of network… Read more »