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 has reportedly dismantled its team working on Facebook Home, its Android homescreen replacement. According to a statement provided by Facebook, however, Home is still supported by the company. Read more »
Yandex.Disk can now import photos from and share photos to Facebook and other social networks — Yandex hopes the latter feature will help it strike deals with printing and stock photo… Read more »
The new messaging app Yo is rapidly attracting attention from users despite its laughably limited functionality. Even if its gimmicky nature quickly fades, though, its early success contains lessons for developers… Read more »
The Facebook-owned virtual reality company has been working with Carbon Design, which has designed everything from the first Kinect to computer mice, for almost a year on upcoming products. Read more »
A report released Tuesday by Forrester, which surveyed more than 4,500 people between the ages of 12 and 17, says that Facebook (s fb) doesn’t have the “teen problem” stemming from a study in… Read more »
The Respect Network’s creators claim to have found “a scalable business model for privacy on the internet.” You’ll need to pay to get in during the early days, but the concept… Read more »
Consumers are increasingly concerned about how their smartphones might be jeopardizing their privacy. But there’s precious little evidence that they’d be willing to pay a premium to alleviate those fears. Read more »
This year’s Structure conference had speakers discussing the rapid adoption of the cloud by enterprises, security and privacy issues, and why they are embracing openness. Read more »
For some time now, businesses have faced many challenges when it comes to the infrastructure needs of consumer-facing applications. But today there are metrics that can help them justify and benchmark… Read more »