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.
The media giant is beta testing TLS encryption, a protocol that allows for emails to be encrypted. The news came after Google singled out some mail providers on poor encryption services. Read more »
Companies like Google and Apple have been colorfully characterized by the People’s Daily as “pawns of the villain.” Looks like this Sino-U.S. argument over surveillance and hacking will run for some… Read more »
Mobile advertisers continue to struggle to deliver targeted marketing campaigns in mobile, largely because cookies are much less important on smartphones than on PCs. Verizon recently joined Google, Facebook and others… Read more »
Finland’s Pryte developed technology that lets carriers charge for mobile data on a per-app, short-term-pass basis. Is this the way forward for Facebook’s Internet.org initiative? Read more »
Last week, Mary Meeker revealed the newest in her annual Internet Trends reports, this one for 2014. The big news? Mobile and tablets. Mobile — Mobile phones are now in the hands… Read more »
Gigaom has written a lot about artificial intelligence over the years. Here are three timelines tracking the rise of deep learning and other learning systems, IBM Watson and AI discussions at… Read more »
The web giant’s plans reportedly involve sending at least 180 small satellites into the skies to enable connectivity using Ku-band spectrum. However, as with Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, it’s not clear who… Read more »
Innovation may be an aging buzzword, but IT execs are only too happy to hear their CEOs parrot it. CIOs can get their seat back at the executive table if they… Read more »