As we stand in awe looking at the graph between internet popularity over time, social networking sites have played a key role in this development. Speaking of social networking sites there are two that spring to our mind in a flick – Orkut and Facebook. Orkut being quite popular in Asian countries and Facebook – well, there is no need to tell. Facebook, found by the college kid Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room, owns much of its growing popularity to its variety applications, sound networking and speed. People can view it as a formal site to get in touch with their school friends or an entertaining hub to just while away your time.
Mark Zuckerberg (CEO), Dustin Moskovitz (Co-founder), Sheryl Sandberg (COO), Matt Cohler (VP of Product Management), Chris Hughes (Co-founder) are few of the important people in the company. It was launched in February, 2009 and is currently owned and run by Facebook Inc. The website’s name originates from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Now anyone who is 13 or above can join the site.
What keeps facebook going is the innovation the company keeps coming on with – their web applications that keeps attracting people around the world, applications that can cater to the entertainment needs of every age group. Their features include the ‘Wall’ where people can post a message(can include videos or links) on a friends profile, a status message letting our friends what were doing right now, an album to upload pictures and videos, Fan pages allowing us to stay in touch with what’s going on our favorite people and groups, ‘Tags’ that allows us to spot our friends in the pictures or videos, ‘notes’ (that contains tags and embeddable images)that allows users to blog, sending virtual gifts,
Facebook has been one of the sites with the most traffic on the internet that uses a PHP skeleton allowing web users to create their own applications using a built in platform. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system, and has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates. They have been leaders in innovating technologies ‘Divvyshot’, the addition of face detection to pictures allowing users to tag their friends automatically.
They have become popular not just in the personal sphere but in the professional sphere as well. Serena software has allowed their workers to use facebook at their workplaces to promote social networking and keep their employees more involved in their work. This allows them to connect them to their co-workers, customers, family and friends. Each Friday the employees are allowed an hour of facebook usage in their 18 countries wide offices.
Where facebook stands apart from Orkut is the privacy privileges it provides to the users, a feature that still needs some development in Orkut. Facebook doesn’t allow only users to view details (like photos, wall posts, videos etc) of another person unless they are friends. Facebook has tied up with MindJolt games allowing users to play flash games from an endless list when they are bored.
The growing popularity has led to a few problems as well. It has become a hotspot for hackers to meddle with. Recent problems with the chat, when anonymous people could view chat conversations others were making, created a tension but they soon recovered from the bug after disabling the chat for a short period. When problems when coupon scams facebook Fan pages or fake ads or social games that install malware lure us and are usually successful in deceiving us. There are almost 20 percent of the employees working to fix the security issues popping up every minute.
Despite the bugs facebook has maintained a remarkable stand in the web-world, gaining trust and popularity among people thereby promoting social connectivity.
It has really made the world a smaller place to live in…
info courtesy: http://www.allfacebook.com/
image courtesy: http://engl3268.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/addicted-to-facebook/