Facebook and Other Social Network Sites - History and Benefits - Essay Example

Facebook Social networking sites are a kind of practical community whose popularity has developed enormously during the last few years. From the time when they were introduced, social networking sites have caught the attention of millions of people and many users have incorporated them into their day-to-day activities. These sites are defined as web-based services that permit people to create a semi-public or public profile in a bounded system; convey a list of other people who they share a connection with; and examine and navigate their record of connections and those of other users inside the system. Today, social network sites with varied technological affordances thereby sustaining a broad range of practices as well as interests exist in hundreds. Whilst the key technological features of these social network sites are consistent, the cultures emerging around them are different. Although most sites encourage pre-existing social networks’ maintenance, others assist strangers to hook up founded on shared interests, activities or political views. Moreover, while some sites take care of different audiences, others draw users based on nationality, common language or shared religious, racial, or sexual identities (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). This paper delves into Facebook, a popular social network that has taken the 19th century generation by storm. Introduction Facebook refers to a very popular internet phenomenon, primarily a site for social networking that allows individuals worldwide to communicate, share videos and photos as well as play such games as Oregon Trail, Scrabble and Chess. Facebook profiles are made up of a collection of small, java-based programs that one can add, and just like Mac, some of them link seamlessly to iPhoto, iTunes, and iCal. Unlike Mac, Facebook is free of charge (Mac Life, 2008). According to reports form Facebook users, on average, most people use between 10-30 minutes daily in Facebook and have between 150-200 friends on their profile (Ellison, et al., 2007). Gallaugher (2009) explains that Mark Zuckerberg, a student from Harvard, created Facebook in the year 2004 February and that Facebook was resulted from Zuckerberg’s drunken tryouts in his dorm room, with one of his experiments comparing his colleagues to farm animals, which almost led to his expulsion from the school. He was a sophomore in Harvard and in the weeks that he spent working on Facebook, he did not even have time to study for ‘Art in the Time of Augustus,’ a course that he was taking. He instead spent time creating a Website that contained every artwork in class and pinging his fellow students to put in to a common study guide. In a very short time, the acumen of crowds generated a sort of traditional Cliffs Notes for the module and following the appraisal of the Web-based crib pane, he championed the test. Later that year, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. At first, the network was restricted for Harvard scholars. Phillips Exeter Academy, Zuckerberg’s high school, came up with the initial idea for the expression Facebook. The school passed the Face Book around to all students as a means of helping students to be acquainted with their classmates for the next year. During that time, it was an actual paper book and many colleges essentially gave students printed facebooks, which included the students’ biographical information, study areas, interest areas among others. Zuckerberg introduced it to the internet and it was a great success. Within a fortnight, half of Boston’s colleges and universities and finally major corporations began requesting for the Facebook network. In four months’ time, Facebook included thirty new school networks. To assist in building Facebook, Zuckerberg recruited his friends Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz immediately (Treadaway & Smith, 2010). By the time Zuckerberg was twenty-three years old, he had won the favor of Newsweek – he was appearing on their cover and they were profiling him on sixty minutes. Moreover, the tech world discussed him with a veneration that only the Google people, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as Steve Jobs previously deserved. However, compared to any of these antecedents, Zuckerberg’s star mounted much quicker. After only two weeks following its launching, Facebook had 4,000 users. In ten months’ time, the number had hit one million users. The firm went on growing, and the business world developed interest. In the year 2006, Viacom (MTV parent) realized that its main demographic was using so much time on Facebook and the company tried to acquire Facebook for seven hundred and fifty million dollars. Zuckerberg however turned down Viacom’s offer. Yahoo also expressed interest of acquiring Facebook in the summer of the year 2006 for one billion dollars. In fact, reports showed that Zuckerberg had agreed to sell the company to Yahoo but after only a few days, the stock price of Yahoo dropped and Yahoo lowered the offer to eight hundred million dollars and Zuckerberg declined the deal. He later turned Yahoo down when the company later offered him one billion dollars a second time (Gallaugher, 2009). With this achievement, Zuckerberg and his colleagues set off for summer and rented a sublet in Palo Alto. Soon after, Zuckerberg came across Sean Parker, Napster’s earlier co-founder. He quickly joined Zuckerberg in his apartment and they started working jointly. Parker introduced Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, Facebook’s very first investor. Thiel was a managing partner of The Founders Fund and a co-founder of PayPal and he put in five hundred thousand dollars 500,000 in Facebook. In mid 2004, Friendster, the first social networking company, tried to acquire Facebook for ten million dollars. The company rejected the offer and later, Accel Partners gave it 12.7 million dollars in funding, at a valuation of roughly one hundred million dollars. Facebook went on growing and in September 2005, it opened up to high school students and added a very popular feature for photo sharing in the subsequent month. During the spring that followed, Facebook received twenty-five million dollars from its earlier investors Peter Thiel and Accel Partners in funding and from Meritech Capital and Greylock Partners. This deal’s pre-money estimation for was roughly five hundred and twenty five million dollars. Afterward, Facebook was made available to work networks, and it amassed more than twenty thousand work networks. In the year 2006 September, Facebook eventually opened to everybody who had an email address (CrunchBase.com, 2012). Web hipsters began selling shirts displaying ‘I Facebooked your Mom!’ In the year 2006, Microsoft, one of the companies that desired some of the magic that came with Facebook, gained the privilege of brokering all banner advertisement sales that streamed on the United States’ Facebook version, assuring one hundred million dollars to Facebook every year through the year 2011. In the year 2007, Microsoft returned, and bought 1.6% of the company for 240 million dollars. They also acquired the rights to sell all Facebook sites’ banner ads all over the world (Gallaugher, 2009). Majority explained this investment was a decision solely driven by Microsoft’s desire to outbid Google. This investment ensued into an increase of over fifteen billion dollars in value, making Facebook the fifth most valuable Internet Company in the US, yet with just a hundred and fifty million dollars in annual revenue. It is important to mention the fact that Facebook is not without competitors, who among others include MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Tagged, Open Social, Bebo, Hi5 and Piczo (CrunchBase.com, 2012). Reports indicate that by the year 2007, Facebook had over twenty-one million registered users creating page views amounting to 1.6 billion on a daily basis. Facebook is strongly assimilated into its users’ day-to-day media practices, with the typical user taking roughly twenty minutes daily on the site and about 67% of users logging in at least one time every day. In the beginning of September of the year 2005, Facebook started on a high school version with the intention of capitalizing on its achievement amongst college learners. In the year 2006, the company set up commercial organizations’ communities and by November of the same year, approximately twenty-two thousand companies had directories on Facebook. In the same year (2006), Facebook ranked as the seventh most widespread site on the World Wide Web with regard to overall page views. Moreover, more than two thousand colleges in the United States used Facebook (Ellison, et al., 2007). Compete.com conducted a study in January 2009 and revealed that in May of the year 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace and became the largest social network in the whole world in terms of monthly active users. By spring of the year 2009, globally, Facebook had over two times the monthly distinctive visitors of MySpace. By June the same year, Facebook outdid MySpace in the US and by July, the company announced having surpassed three hundred and fifty million users as well as being cash-flow positive (Furht, 2010). Between December 2008-2009, approximately six hundred thousand to one million users were filling into Facebook’s servers to open new accounts with the company every day Gallaugher, 2009). At the start of February 2010, the number had risen to 373 million monthly active users globally. Facebook began the rapid increase when it started offering its services in numerous languages (over seventy languages as on February 10, 2010) – it quickly spread to such countries as South Africa, Iceland, Turkey, Indonesia, France Canada, Chile, Norway, among others. The US tops the list with over five million new users and the country also remains the single largest country on Facebook, with around one hundred and eight monthly active users (35 percent of the total population of the United States) (Furht, 2010). About half of all people who use Facebook login every single day and most of them use thirty minutes and above getting their everyday Facebook fix. Moreover, Facebook is host to all and sundry, with users who are 35 years and above accounting for over half of the company’s every day guests as well as its rapidly growing populace (Gallaugher, 2009). The fastest growing demographic comprises users over thirty years. Internationally, Facebook has also experienced a huge growth with fifteen percent of its user base being in Canada. In the US, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site along with being the top photo-sharing site with approximately 4.1 billion photos uploaded. The addiction or passion of Facebook users to the site is unequaled: over half of the users use the site on daily basis and usually spend an average of nineteen minutes on Facebook per day (CrunchBase.com 2012). Gallaugher (2009) also explains that apart from offering a platform through which people present themselves, establish connections, interact, maintain connections, the incorporated set of services that the company offers impinges on a broad array of reputable Internet businesses. Facebook has grown into the greatest site for sharing photos on the internet – the site takes in some 28 million photos every day and on YouTube, Facebook users share eight million videos every month. Facebook also has search designs. Although Bing and Google catalog some Facebook contents, Facebook embodies immense blind point for Google search because much of it is private, and can only be accessed among friends. As a joint venture, Facebook and Microsoft provide internet search results via Bing.com. Facebook has however declared its intent of offering a search engine on its own, hich will provide synchronized access to up to date results from links, status updates, as well as other information that friends make available. It is also very important to note that Facebook is political in big, government-threatening ways. In the activist’s toolbox, Facebook is deemed such an influential instrument that such nations as Syria, Iran, and China have, occasionally, attempted to stop access to the site inside their borders. Saudi Arabian women have used lobbied for driving privileges though the site while Egyptians remonstrated for democracy through it too. Furthermore, ABC News co-sponsored the presidential debates of the United States with Facebook and the Obama campaign even recruited Chris Hughes, Facebook cofounder, to come up with a social media site known as my.barackobama.com, which was considered invaluable in the United State’s presidential victory of the year 2008. It is important to point out the controversy with social network ConnectU, which has been one unpleasant issue for Facebook. Former Zuckerberg’s classmates at Harvard who founded ConnectU make a claim that Zuckerberg stole their invented source code for Facebook, an ordeal that has gone to court but has now been resolved. Despite this lingering controversy, during the fall of 2007, Facebook’s growth was astounding. Each week, more than one million new users signed up (two hundred thousand sign-ups per day). This totaled to more than fifty million active users. In effect, Facebook received forty billion page views in the course of a single month (CrunchBase.com, 2012). Conclusion Apparently, Facebook is one of the greatest innovations. The site has become the most popular social networking site that has grown and continues to grow rapidly. Facebook accommodates all kinds of people, young and old, great and small – it offers its users the chance of interacting with an astonishingly extensive world of new individuals. It also gives them the opportunity of sculpting their online identity as well as learning more concerning the way in which the Internet along with its diverse programs operate to develop new communities and new relationships. Family members can also maintain close ties with their close relatives as well as reconnect with their distant relatives. For the business-minded individuals, it provides the best platform where they can market themselves. For people with specific hobbies or social identities, it helps them in finding friends with whom they share common interests and politicians and activists can use it to ensure that things work in their favor. Indeed, Facebook is an opinion catalyst, a traffic driver and a kingmaker. References Boyd, D. M. & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1). CrunchBase.com, (2012). Facebook. Retrieved from http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook Ellison, N. B., et al. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends:" Social Capital and College Students use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), article 1. Furht, B. (2010). Handbook of Social Network Technologies and Applications. New York: Springer. Gallaugher, J. (2009). Information Systems. New York: Flat World Knowledge, LLC. Mac Life, (2008, Spring). Facebook. Make the Most of Facebook. South San Francisco, CA: Future US, Inc. Treadaway, C. & Smith, M. (2010). Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Read More