Facebook

facebook.com

Facebook, Inc. Wikipedia

Facebook is a social networking website that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information. Launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Northeastern University), Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, it has been made available to any email address user who inputs a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.



As of July 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 34 million active members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks). From September 2006 to September 2007 it increased its ranking from 60th to 7th most visited web site, and was the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.



The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.