Facebook

Facebook

The world's largest social network

The world's largest social network, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg. Originally intended for communication of students at Harvard University, but since 2006, check it is open. In 2008 entered the Russian market.

Site Facebook (facebook.com) was launched in February 2004, a student at Harvard University (Harward University) Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) [30]. Originally the site was called Thefacebook.com [47].
Zuckerberg was born in 1984 and worked with youth programming [10], [23]. His first "social" project he started in 2003 when he was a second year student at Harvard University: cracking a database of photos from my university dormitory residents, he laid them on the site Facemash, where visitors and sees two of the photographs and asked to choose the one that attracted more thus created rating. Facemash immediately became popular among students, but Zuckerberg was forced to close after the administration of the university threatened him with the exception of [46], [10], [47], [48], [42].
According to Zuckerberg, experience Facemash only strengthened his desire "to make Harvard a more open and create an alternative zaparolennym custom albums [42], [47]. In late 2003 he agreed to offer undergraduate brothers, Cameron (Cameron) and Tyler Vinklvossov (Tyler Winklevoss) and Divya Narendra (Divya Narendra) to help them with the creation of a dating site for university students HarvardConnection.com [25], [10], [9], but in January 2004, undertook to create it independently and within a month, on February 4, launched at thefacebook.com closed social network for students Garvada. Zuckerberg helped Dustin Moskovitz (Dustin Moskovitz), Chris Haag (Chris Hughes) and Eduardo Saverin (Eduardo Saverin) [46], [49], [10], [11], [47], [42]. Despite the fact that the functions of the new website was a little more, it quickly became popular among the students of Harvard University [47], [42], [49], and in March, check it was open to students and Yale (Yale), Stanford ( Stanford) and Columbia University (Columbia University) [49]. To create a new account, require that the user has valid email address in the educational domain, edu, after authorization has been resolved, and other universities in the U.S. [49], [30], [46].
In June 2004, Zuckerberg decided to quit teaching at Harvard and moved to Palo Alto, where he continued to manage their website [49], [42], [11]. By the end of the year on it the function of groups and "wall" in the profile, and the number of registered users has reached one million. By mid-2004, Zuckerberg registered the company as a legal person, and he became its CEO. Initially, funds for the functioning of the social network was isolated parents Zuckerberg (total they spent on this 85 thousand U.S. dollars) [51], but then it attracted significant investments: a half million dollars invested in Facebook founder Peter Thiel eBay (Peter Thiel) [46], [49] [21], [11], [42], and in May 2005, 12.5 million dollars in the social network has invested venture capital fund Accel Partners [46], [49], [42], [51], [21] . In August 2005, over 200 thousand dollars was purchased domain facebook.com, Facebook became the official name of the company [49], [51].
In August 2005 the right to register on Facebook were senior students of U.S. schools (high school), which initially had to register to receive an invitation in the same year, Facebook had the opportunity to connect to foreign users [49]. Finally, in September 2006, registration for Facebook became free for all comers, without invitations [44], [49], [30]. By early 2007, the site recorded 12 million active users by the end of 2008 - 150 million, and the spring of 2010 - 400 million users [49], [11].
Head Office and Server Facebook were placed in the Silicon Valley, Palo Alto. As of 2010 the company employed more than 200 employees, whose average age is 31 years [30], [36], [51], [42]. Zuckerberg went on to hold the post of general director of the company, and for this it due to dissatisfaction of investors in 2005 had to hire a coach to train top managers [51], [50]. The activities of the social network to provide leased servers, but in 2010, Facebook announced the construction of its own data center [13].
In 2008, Facebook has been translated into Russian [30], in 2010, the social network has been available for more than sixty languages of the world [17]. At the same year, most users of Facebook was from the U.S., Britain, Indonesia, Turkey and France [8]
One of the main rivals Facebook social network called MySpace: they appeared almost simultaneously. For some time, MySpace was twice as large users, but Facebook Myspace outstripped the number of unique visitors in June 2008 [35], [31]
In 2006, earned a function browsing Facebook via mobile phone, then to the number of supported devices added iPod Touch and iPhone [30]. In 2007, Facebook opened to third-party developers to create games and other applications for the site [40], [30]. Thus, for many people in the U.S. and other countries where Facebook was popular, he became one of the main ways to communicate, share photos and find old friends [47], [5]. Facebook gradually became not only a means of virtual communication. For example, in Australia, the courts were permitted to circulate agenda through Facebook [26], and owned by Richard Branson's airline Virgin Atlantic dismiss staff for their reports in this social network [27].
In 2006, Facebook had invested 27.5 million dollars the company Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners [30], [49]. That same year, Zuckerberg was going to sell a controlling stake in Facebook, Yahoo! For $ 1 billion (other details of the proposal have not been disclosed), but after the financial performance of the latter came to grief, he persuaded the board of directors to abandon the transaction [38], [42], [30], [51], [43], and since then the main source of income for Facebook began sponsoring programs that have been signed with Apple and the bank JPMorgan Chase [30], [42]. In 2007, Facebook signed an agreement with Microsoft on strategic partnership for the period up to 2011. Microsoft has received the exclusive right to advertising in social networks in the U.S. and abroad, as well as bought 1.6 percent of its shares worth 240 million dollars [35], [38], [34], [37], [36] [30]. Thus, the total value of Facebook was valued at U.S. software giant $ 15 billion. Such a high value then explained that apart from Microsoft's agreement with Facebook calculated in Google [36], [38], [35], [34].
In 2009, another owner of Facebook has become a Russian company Digital Sky Technologies, which belonged to Yuri Milner, and Gregory Figner. Among the other assets of the company were Russian social networkOdnoklassniki.ru","Vkontakte, ICQ instant messenger and portal Mail.Ru. 1.96 per cent stake Facebook DST acquired for 200 million dollars (that is cheaper than Microsoft) [23], [15], [7], [21]>[22]. In the spring of 2010 DST has brought its share to 10 percent of Facebook, some of the shares had been bought from Peter Thiel [51], [6]. Also, a small percentage of shares owned by the fund Elevation Partners [6]. By 2010, the value of Facebook is valued at between 15 [11] to 19.2 billion U.S. dollars [6]. According to official statistics, social networking revenues for 2009 totaled $ 700 million, and in 2010 it was expected that the owners it would bring up to 2 billion [6], [12].
However, Zuckerberg refused to withdraw the company's shares on the stock exchange and sell it completely [35], [42], [12]. The ownership structure of companies do not disclose: according to some sources, Zuckerberg personally owned about 25 percent of the company [10]. Already in 2008, Zuckerberg with a fortune of half a billion dollars went into the list of world's richest people according to magazine Forbes, and by 2010 his fortune was estimated at four billion [11], [32], [30], [29].
Facebook had a significant influence on political life in many countries. So in Iran in 2009 after the re-election President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and unrest broke out the country's authorities shut down access to Facebook and YouTube [19], [20]. Also blocking Facebook implemented the PRC [18] and Pakistan, the latter allowing you to access social network after her campaign drawing pictures with the Prophet Mohammed in May 2010 [4]. Facebook has also played an important role in U.S. politics, where politicians have tried to keep up with each other and recorded in the social networks to attract these voters, the press is even called "the effect of Facebook" [14], [28].
Despite assurances Zuckerberg and Facebook guidance that they are determined to protect the personal information of users of social networking, shortly after the founding of the site began protests against the users of innovations, both, or otherwise make available any personal data without their knowledge or consent [45], [5]. Facebook is often criticized for use of personal information of users for content [38] and the inability to completely delete my account [33] In addition, in February 2009 of the user agreement has been removed item that users have at any time to remove all downloaded their contents, and Facebook has the right to dispose of all the data that had been downloaded by users. After protests rules for the use of social network were returned to the previous version [23]. One of the biggest scandals Facebook occurred after the introduction of the function Newsfeed, allows you to watch a tape of one message all your friends on social networking: users quickly discovered that this option bypasses the privacy of their installation. Programmers social networks have been forced to fix the problem for three days, but the group "Students against Facebook", protesting against the innovations gathered by that time more than 700,000 members [51], [30], [5].
In 2009 it became known that Facebook censor personal messages, in particular, prohibited to post links to torrent files to The Pirate Bay [5], [24]. Also, social network was criticized for the fact that it deletes the photos or user of blocked accounts, which on its pages published photographs in which breast fed infants [39].
At the end of 2009 Facebook, after consultation with lawyers, experts in the field of protection of personal data, has made much of the personal information of its users available for free access, including information about locations of study and work, musical preferences, and even the status messages. It also caused dissatisfaction among users, many of whom have filed lawsuits: the press wrote that Facebook can make to your account visible to friends only, but not superior [16], [5]. It is noteworthy that in 2010 in Wired magazine called for the creation of alternative, an open social network and accused Zuckerberg that he dreams of world domination [5].
Press a lot written about the existence of "clones" Facebook, one of them called the Russian portal facebook [30], [41]. In 2008, Facebook filed a lawsuit against German social network StudiVZ, accusing her of plagiarism, but then withdrew. According to experts, it was only a PR-action, because the prospects in this lawsuit was not [21]. There were rumors that Facebook would sue lawsuit against facebook, but this never happened [30], [21].
Incidentally, Zuckerberg himself was accused of plagiarism: in 2004 the creators HarwardConnections, later renamed ConnectU claimed that Tsukerberger deceived them, and shared operating time for your own site. That same year, Zuckerberg was suspected of hacking into the e-mail Harvard journalists who had planned to write about this case. The conflict was settled after the brothers Vinklvossy and Narendra received 65 million dollars in compensation [25], [10], [46], [9].
In June 2010, U.S. citizen Paul Chella (Paul D. Ceglia), previously charged with fraud, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that in April 2003 signed a contract with Zuckerberg to create a site "The Face Book". Under this contract, Chella for 1000 dollars allegedly received 50 percent of the shares the site with the condition that if, before the beginning of 2004, the site will not be running for his share should have been put on by one percent per day. As a result, Chella claimed 84 per cent of the company. In Facebook this claim named a completely frivolous [1], [3], [2].
Materials used

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