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.
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In recent months, there’s been a spate of tech companies publishing their staff demographics. We’ve taken the liberty of turning all of them into pie charts — for gender — and… Read more »
Vine’s newest feature lets users import video into the app. This is bound to delight the brands trying to reach teens, who can now produce prettier Vines, at the risk of… Read more »
This is not your dad’s walkie-talkie. OnBeep wants to produce beautiful wearable devices that will let consumers communicate with select colleagues without staring down at their phones Read more »
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has reportedly been meeting with big companies to pitch the ephemeral messaging app as a content channel and advertising option, according to the Wall Street Journal. Ads would… Read more »
Experiments at many leading large-scale data centers hold lessons for smaller ones that may not have the dedicated engineering and facilities staffs to fine-tune their data center’s efficiency. Read more »