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.
Facebook will have to deal with a class-action lawsuit that alleges that the company violated privacy laws by scanning the private messages of users for better advertising, according to a Tuesday… Read more »
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In what might be the slowest tech news week of the year, there’s a weird tidbit out of New Jersey. A U.S. District Judge has ruled that cops are allowed to create… Read more »
If a Citigroup analyst is right about the amount of revenue that Instagram will be able to generate from advertising over the next couple of years, Facebook’s acquisition of the company… Read more »
Remember the popular ’90s social networking app Bebo? Yeah, me neither. The Facebook predecessor, which dominated British social networking for awhile, sold to AOL for $850 million in 2008. The corporate… Read more »
The Center for Digital Democracy wants the Federal Trade Commission to really look over Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Datalogix, announced Monday morning. The combined consumer data gathered by (via partnerships with… Read more »
True disruption doesn’t mean merely competing. It means changing the structure of markets, the participants within them, and the balance of power. Read more »
Gigaom’s Structure Data conference is just three months away — March 18 and 19 in New York — and it’s looking like our fifth one will be the best one yet. The… Read more »
During the holiday season, ideally filled with family, food, and festivities, the topic of depression is often sidelined; even more of a taboo subject than usual. But research suggests it is… Read more »
Marketing’s war with social media rages on. In one corner, you have the Twitterverse—a temperamental beast that never sleeps, is always hungry, and changes shape on a minute-by-minute basis. In the… Read more »