Social Technology Deep Dive: Facebook - Case Study Example

Social Technology Deep Dive: Facebook Author’s Name Grade course Institution Tutor Date Introduction Since time immemorial, businesses have relied on customer feedback as the best way to know how business is doing in the industry. Today, more than ever, customer feedback has proved to be is one important, if not the only, aspect that business owners cannot do without, and organization CEOs cannot just brush off (Kemper 2013). The amount of money that businesses are spending in form of the production of customer feedback material of and the analysis of this data has continued to soar. This has partly been due to the increased consumer demographics and their diversities that businesses have to deal with as they struggle to meet their demands. Moreover, customers today are more in need of avenues they can use to air their opinions on services offered by businesses whenever they feel that they are not getting the service that are supposed to (Kemper 2013). Facebook is an online social network site that’s used by individuals to keep in touch with friends as well as make new friends. Facebook allows registered members to post on their personal accounts their personal opinions and feelings at a particular time and share it with friends. Firstly this white paper is going to give a detailed guide of Facebook by reviewing through its history, how it has penetrated the market since its inception and its competitors in the market. Then it will look at the technology behind it, the problems it has helped solve at the individual level and corporate level, its features, security and ethical issues and opportunities that the product leverage on to stay ahead of the competition (Ellison 2009). Product Overview Facebook was the brainchild of college student Mark Zuckerberg while attending Havard as a freshman. On October 28, 2003, Zuckergerg wrote a program he named Facemash whereby he placed two photos at a time of fellow college mates that asked people to choose who the hottest person was (Phillips 2007). Facemash became so popular in Harvard that Zuckerberg was accused of security and privacy breach; the charges were however dropped. Mark continued to work on Facemash and on February 4 2004, ‘Thefacebook’ was born. Zuckergerg was later joined by his friends Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Huhges. With major investments in coming its way, they dropped ‘the’ from its name after acquiring the domain facebook.com (Phillips 2007). Initially, before Facebook was created, Facemash had given Zuckergerg an indication of the how popular such a platform would be. Facemash, within a very short period had surpassed its competition, Hot or Not, in terms of membership. The acquisition of facebook.com domain coupled with major investments from Peter Thiel, paypal co-founder, Facebook was beginning to give MySpace a run for its money (Phillips 2007). At this time, MySpace was the leading market leader in the global social network arena. Market penetration was gradual at first but then begun to gain momentum because after only 8 years since inception, Facebook had surpassed the 1 billion active users mark and was not showing any signs of slowing down. As at 2012, the social network site was boasting of a massive 180 petabytes of data annually which has continued to grow by over half a petabyte every day. As at December 2013, Facebook had 1.23 billion active users (Phillips 2007). Facebook, despite being able to maintain a lead in the social network market, faces stiff competition from Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and Flickr. Facebook has managed to stay at the front of the pack because of its easy user friendly user interface that makes it easy for first time registered members to navigate (Phillips 2007). MySpace has been around the social network arena for a very long time and despite the head start it had enjoyed the site could only talk of 36 million members as at October 2013. Twitter considered Facebook’s major competition has continued to grow at a gradual rate and in October 2013 they reported that their membership had grown to 645 million users, up 6.8% from 2012 statistics (Phillips 2007). Identification of Underlying Technologies As a social network platform, Facebook majorly relies on messaging technologies in order to make communication among members as smooth and real time as possible. Given that there are over 350 million Facebook users sending about 15 billion messages monthly, it is clear that Facebook cannot afford to compromise on its messaging technology (Zeichick 2008). In 2008, Facebook’s Operations and Database teams decided to ditch the open-source Cassandra and MySQL as they both proved to be inconsistent and could not handle the cumbersome nature of the long tails of data; as people continued to send huge amounts of massages data continued to grow large and therefore performance suffered a great deal. Facebook teams thus settled for the open-source HBase, because of its incredible scalability and good performance capable of handling this kind of workload and at the same time much more consistent model than open-source Cassandra (Zeichick 2008). HBase is also rich in features such as compression support, maintains an auto-load balance as well as packing multiple shards per single server. Further, the underlying file system that HBase uses, HDFS, provides various different features like replication and automatic rebalancing. The database team also had to write an application server from start since massages to Facebook come from email and SMS and this enables it to handle any decisions that the user may make regarding messaging (Zeichick 2008). This technology has thus ensured that messaging services are robust, reliable and perform well enough to accommodate the stresses of real time messaging. Solution to Problem Generally, Facebook is a platform for keeping in touch with friends and to-be friends. Facebook has, since its creation, allowed businesses to form groups and eventually create business pages where they can interact with their customers in real time (Kemper 2013). Companies can take up this opportunity and create Facebook pages where they can post status updates every other minute informing customers of any new developments in their services or products. Facebook has also made available, in its page, a Comment Box plugin via the Facebook Developers platform where companies can install the plugin and place it in their website (Kemper 2013). This offers customers an immediate freedom to give their feedback real time. One important thing that companies can take note of is that the feedback from the Facebook platform is genuine since customers can only give feedback if they are logged into their real Facebook accounts. This ensures that no anonymous content is posted. Companies have continued to keep their customers updated on new developments regarding products and services. Today, whenever a consumer is dissatisfied with a given companies service, it is rare to see them call the customer care number. The solution is just a click away and what consumers actually do is that they just log in to their personal Facebook accounts, search the said company’s official page and then just write them a message. The feedback from companies is always instant and solutions for the aggrieved parties are always immediate (Kemper 2013). At this point it should be noted that feedback can be two way as customers give feedback to companies, companies also give feedback to customers in terms of solutions to complains. Product Standard Features and Tools Facebook has several features that can help companies communicate with their customers easily. First and foremost, the Facebook Developers platform allows companies to download the Comment Box plugin and install it in their corporate websites making it easy for customers to give feedback immediately (Boutin, 2013). The Star Rating feature is also another tool that companies can take advantage of. Using this feature, customers are able to give a rating to companies whether they are offline or online and this information can be seen by everyone else. Most people make decisions to buy products only after they have seen the ratings of these products or services. This just goes on to show how important this feature is for companies. Companies can ask customers to rate them which would in turn inform other customers of what they think of their company. A third very important feature that Facebook has developed for businesses is the ‘Pages to Watch’ feature (Boutin, 2013). This feature gives businesses the opportunity to keep track of how competitor pages are fairing on in terms of audience acquisition. It is simple to use as what is required is simply the addition of competitors to the Pages to Watch list in the admin panel. Risks and Weaknesses Facebook is definitely without risks and weaknesses as with any other application or social network site. One major risk is the hacking of accounts by scrupulous individuals who might be doing it just for fun. The risk of hacking is very real and may cost companies a lot of in terms of the type of information is relayed to consumers during that moment. Many personal accounts have been hacked over the past and hackers end up sending obscene messages to friends without the owner of the account knowing (Rosoff 2012). Facebook keeps reminding members to use passwords that are strong enough to make them hard to guess. Another alternative that members are advised they can do is to keep change their passwords. Another risk Facebook users may face is that the platform allows any registered member to go through the profiles of other users and send friend requests (Rosoff 2012). This trend has given rise to a group of internet stalkers preying on innocent social network users. Such stalkers have gone to the extent of monitoring the activities of their ‘prey’ and there have been reported cases of burglary after a user posted on his/her account that he/she will be going for a night out. This gives this new breed of stalkers enough information to go to the victim’s premises and steal from them. It is thus important to treat Facebook strangers just like one would in real life. Strangers should remain strangers. Sharing of files has been going on via social networking sites and Facebook has not been left behind. This sharing comes with the risk of downloading computer viruses that may prove potentially harmful to individuals as well as corporate accounts (Rosoff 2012). Such viruses are meant to corrupt computer systems or collect personal information that may be used against the victim. Downloading files only trustworthy sources and also keeping an antivirus will help prevent such occurrences. The fact that social networking sites provide a platform for posting one’s own opinions and feelings; it should be handled with care. What one posts on his/her account will affect so many things such as employment opportunities. Influential people are often looking at social media an unflattering profile is sure to affect the future. Users are thus advised to be careful what they post on their personal accounts because one can never be sure of who is watching (Rosoff 2012). Security Considerations Since Facebook was launched in 2004, it has gained a massive following to become a leading social networking site globally (Frum 2012). The explosion it has experienced in terms of member registration has brought with it security concerns affecting the freedom with which users interact with the platform. The number of hackers has continued to increase and have found ways to go round Facebook’s privacy settings. Although security teams are working day and day out to maintain the tight security it want for its site, the battle between them and hackers is never ending. As such, Facebook has continued to call on users to constantly review applications installed on their accounts and delete applications that have become obsolete (Frum 2012). The Facebook Developer App by Facebook provides developers with an option for them to protect their applications. Developers can use the ‘Sandbox Mode’ to test their applications while at the same time keeping them away from users and only a selected few testers can have access to them (Frum 2012). Facebook has gone further to ensure that they notify developers whenever it is detected that their app is modified. This ensures that apps are not getting modified by third parties without developers’ permission. Ethical Considerations With Facebook, children aged 13 years and above and have a valid email account are allowed to become members. This brings about ethical issues as most are of the opinion that at the age of 13, children are vulnerable to social network stalkers. There have been adults posing as kids and predate on teenagers in what has been referred to as online child pornography (Golijan, 2012). It is hard for Facebook to know who is a child and who is not as it is very simple to create a fake account. Another ethical issue is the posting of pornographic pictures, videos and updates by individuals. Every other day, more and more people are posting obscene material and it is a war that Facebook seems to be losing (Golijan, 2012). Cyber bullying is also another ethical issue that should be considered. So many teenagers as well as adults have committed suicide over the last couple of years as a result of cyber bullying. Facebook and other social networking sites should be compelled to reveal the identities of those involved in cyber bullying because at the moment they are getting away with what they do. However, privacy issues in revealing registered members identities has been the major obstacle and question arise as to what extent user privacy can be enjoyed (Golijan, 2012). Opportunities There are endless opportunities for Facebook to continue leading the pack in social network. In February 2014, Facebook bought the Whatsapp messenger application to further enrich its users messaging experience. Partnership and relevant acquisitions is one big step forward towards exponential success. Facebook did announce that they will not be changing the application a lot but it is hard to believe that it will remain the way it is. They will definitely add tweaks to it to make it even more user friendly. Another opportunity that Facebook can explore is the enabling of hashtags in its site. Doing this will allow advertisers to use hashtags to buy advertising on the site that is targeted at individuals who search for a particular term. In essence, hashtags will let companies know what is trending and capitalize on this by aligning there services and products towards this spike in interest. Another opportunity that Facebook may be faced with is partnering with a credit card company so that developers can get discounts on payments they make. This would be a win-win situation for everyone as the credit card company would have access to the many Facebook users as well as developers; developers would make applications affordable; and Facebook would drive more developers to its platform thus increasing application development (Cashmore 2009). Future Features and Recommendations Recently, Facebook introduced the timeline feature for businesses. Companies can now look at their activities from as far back as when they created their Facebook pages on the site. This feature has made it easy to navigate the through one’s own activities. Another feature that Facebook recently introduced is the ability for users to edit their comment (Boutin, 2013). Before this feature, once a comment had been made, it was impossible to edit it or even delete it if a mistake was made. This made users to be very careful with whatever they wrote so as to avoid mistakes. This feature has taken the pressures off and users are able to type without the fear of making irreversible mistakes. A third subtle but interesting feature is the addition of emoticons in the chat section. Although it may be considered as not important enough, it adds to a more enriching and interesting chatting experience (Boutin, 2013). The company is in the process of designing a few new features that it promises to improve user social networking experience. One of them is the tweaking of the messaging section that will allow users which of their friends is online and what devices they were using at the moment (Boutin, 2013). The effect of this is that senders of messages will know the kind of device their messages ended in. References Boutin, P. (2013, January 2). More Facebook Changes. The New York Times, retrieved March 1, 2014, from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/technology/personaltech/facebooks- latest-mobile-interface-expands-features.html? Cashmore , P. (2009, November 12). Is Facebook the Future of Micropayments? CNN Tech. Retrieved March I, 2014, from http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/cashmore.facebook.micropayments/index.html Ellison, N (2009). The Benefits of Facebook ‘friends’: social Capital and College Students’ use of Online Social network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Retieved March 1 2014, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html Frum, D. (August 7, 2012). Facebook Needs to Earn your Trust. CNN News, Retrieved March 1, 2014, from http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/06/opinion/frum-facebook/ Golijan, R. (May 3, 2012). Consumer Reports: Facebook Privacy Problems are on the Rise. NBC News Technology, Retrieved March, from http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/consumer-reports-facebook-privacy-problems- are-rise-749990 Kemper, A. (Nov 7, 2013). Social Media Checklist For New Websites & Businesses. Marketing Land. Retrieved March 1, 2014, from http://marketingland.com/social-media- checklist-for-startup-websites-61464 Phillips, S. (2007, July 25). A Brief History of Facebook. theguardian, Retrieved March, 2014, from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.newmedia Rosoff, M. (2012, February 1). Facebook's Biggest Weakness: Mobile. Business Insider, Retrieved March 1, 20124, from http://www.businessinsider.com/no-wonder-facebook- is-making-a-phone-2012-2 Zeichick, A. (2008, June 23). How Facebook Works. MIT Technology Review, retrieved March 1, 2014, from http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/410312/how-facebook- works/ Read More