WEBSITE : FACEBOOK FEATURES

WEBSITE : FACEBOOK FEATURES

A login form is shown, on the left, and a registration form, on the right, for users who are not members.


Facebook users can choose to join one or more networks on the website, such as a school, place of employment, geographic region, or school group. These networks help users connect with members of the same network. Users can also connect to friends, giving them access to their friends' profiles.


The website is free to users, but generates revenue from advertising, including banner ads. Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends.


Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising, and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory, which only contains advertisements that have been pre-approved by Microsoft and have an existing agreement established between Microsoft and the advertiser. When compared with other web companies, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!. The data collected is used to show more relevant advertisements to website visitors.


Facebook Features: The media often compares Facebook to Myspace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. Myspace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text. The lack of decoration has been said to make the site more appealing to job seekers. Users can network, and even announce to their friends that they are seeking. In April 2007, CareerBuilder introduced a Facebook application that allows job recruiters to search through profiles.


Several features from the original Facebook website still exist. They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see, Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other. Photos, where users can upload albums and photos, and status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. The Facebook Wall allows users to post messages on the profile of their friends. A user's Wall is visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, which depends on their privacy settings. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.

Over time, Facebook has added several new features to its website. On September 6, 2006, a New Feed was announced, which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthday related to the user's friends. Initially, the New Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users: some complained that the News Feed was too cluttered and full of undesired information, while

FACEBOOK IN THE WORLD

FACEBOOK

Updated May 27, 2009

Facebook, by some measurements the most popular social network with more than 200 million active users worldwide, is one of the fastest-growing and best-known sites on the Internet today.

The company, founded in 2004 by a Harvard sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg, began life catering first to Harvard students and then to all high school and college students. It has since evolved into a broadly popular online destination used by both teenagers and adults of all ages.

Like other social networks, the site allows its users to create a profile page and forge online links with friends and acquaintances. It has distinguished itself from rivals, partly by imposing a spartan design ethos and limiting how users can change the appearance of their profile pages. That has cut down on visual clutter and threats like spam, which plague rival social networks. In May 2007, Facebook unveiled an initiative called Facebook Platform, inviting third-party software makers to create programs for the service and to make money on advertising alongside them. The announcement stimulated the creation of hundreds of new features or "social applications" on Facebook , from games to new music and photo sharing tools, which had the effect of further turbo-charging activity on the site.

In May 2009, a Russian investment firm, Digital Sky Technologies, invested $200 million in Facebook in return for a 1.96 percent stake. The investment values Facebook's preferred stock at $10 billion, a $5 billion drop from October 2007 when Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake. With the latest round of financing, Facebook has raised about $600 million since it was founded in 2004.

At the time of Microsoft's investment in 2007, Facebook's $15 billion valuation drew criticism for being unrealistically high and a sign of a bubble in social network investments. With the new valuation, Facebook is demonstrating to its critics that it is living up to its early promise.

Facebook's rise has been marked by several controversies. Three other Harvard students maintain that they came up with the original idea and that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom they had hired to write code for the site, stole the idea and surreptitiously created a rival company. Facebook has denied the allegations; a lawsuit is pending.

Another Harvard classmate, Aaron Greenspan, asserts that he created the underlying architecture for both companies, but has declined to enter the legal fray .

In November 2007, Facebook again created a storm when it announced a new advertising system called Beacon, in which users' purchases or activities on some 40 partner sites were broadcast to their Facebook friends. Some users claimed that they were not adequately warned about the feature, and the political activist group MoveOn.org organized a protest group on Facebook, which attracted more than 70,000 members.

In December, Facebook capitulated to a key demand of the protesters by offering users an easy way to decline to take part in Beacon.

In February 2009, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.

After a wave of protests from its users, Facebook said that it would withdraw changes to its terms of service. Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s next revision of terms would reflect “a new approach” and would be “a substantial revision from where we are now.”

From

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html