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 spending $2 billion to buy Oculus Rift may disappoint gamers, but I think it should give anyone who likes interacting with people in real life a bit of a pause. Read more »
Facebook detailed on Tuesday a new cybersecurity framework called ThreatData. It’s a collection of systems for ingesting, analyzing and acting upon threat data that can vary greatly in both type and… Read more »
Frank Frankovsky, one of the men responsible for Facebook’s foray into building hardware, has left the social networking giant to form his own startup. Read more »
The French consumer rights group UFC-Que Chosir has sued Facebook(s fb), Google(s goog) and Twitter(s twtr) in the Paris high court over their terms of service and data collection practices. In… Read more »
The Turkish government has imposed a media blackout on a corruption investigation that goes all the way to the top. Now, as people turn to Twitter and YouTube to bypass that… Read more »
Facebook is trying to make it easier for its developers to write code quickly, so it has built a new programming language called Hack. It’s transitioning as much of its code… Read more »
The Asian e-commerce giant is ponying up $215 million in a strategic investment that spreads its reach into the U.S. Now flush, Tango plans to staff up and accelerate its social… Read more »