What Is Facebook And Why Is It So Popular?

For folks that might be living in Mars, Facebook is considered to be the most famous social networking webpage nowadays. Facebook was launched in February 2004 and is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. It has more than 500 million active users worldwide as of July 2010. Through this social networking website, users can add folks as friends and send them direct messages. They can also update their private profiles to enlighten their friends about themselves. In addition to this, users can link in networks organized by workplace, school or college. Facebook allows anyone who claims to be aged 13 or older to become a member of the website.

Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and associate computer science classmates, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The site was primarily limited to Harvard students but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League and Stanford University. Then it expanded backup for students at other universities and ultimately, to everybody with ages 13 and above.

Facebook gives a lot of applications and one of the most famous is the Pictures app. Through this app, users can upload albums and images. Facebook allows its users to upload a limitless number of pictures unlike other image hosting services like Photobucket and Flickr. During Facebook’s early years, users were limited to only 60 photos per album. And as of May 2009, the quantity of photos that users can upload in one album increased to 200. Another feature under the photos app is the ability to mark users in a photo. Privacy settings can also be defined for individual albums, allowing just the users that are defined to view that certain album.

In August 22, 2006, Facebook made the Notes app. This add-on provides a blogging feature that permitted users to tag and even embed pictures. Later, users were permitted to import blogs from other blogging pages like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. And in April 7, 2008 Facebook launched an instant messaging add-on called “Chat”. This app lets users commune with friends. It is also parallel to certain instant messaging programs.

On June 2009, Facebook introduced a “Username” feature. This feature allows users to custom-make their URL to a much simpler one. For example, your URL will appear like http://www.facebook.com/astraea rather than the ordinary http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4238742361. In addition to this, Facebook can now be accessed by smart phones through their web-browsing software.

Like other well-known social networking pages, Facebook also had its share of negative feedbacks. It has been blocked in several countries like Pakistan, Syria, Vietnam, Iran and North Korea. It was also banned in various places of work to foreclose employees from wasting time using this web page. Even so, latest studies still implied that Facebook is the most well known social networking website arount the world today.

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