Facebook

I've recently got really interested in this social-networking website, Facebook. It's very much like Friendster, only I think it's so much better. While Friendster got sort of stagnant in offering new services and platforms to generate new interest for subscribers, Facebook seems to have hit the jackpot by building into its architecture a way of allowing 3rd party applications to be written for it.

So I went to open an account of Facebook after deleting many emails sent to me by people who wanted me to "be their friend" on many other pseudo-social-networking platforms, many I've never heard of before. And guess what? I really like it! It's interface is quite intuitive and it doesn't take long before you get the hang of everything and are adding all kind of funny stuff onto it. The best thing about it? Looking for old classmates and friends that you have not seen in years and checking on how their photos to see how they look like now. Ha ha. Yes, we used to have Friendster for that, but somehow, it's much easier to do so on Facebook and I managed to find many more people than I did on Friendster!

I've pieced together a little history of this website that I adapted and summarised from Wikipedia. Read it after the break.

In February 2004, Wyliena Guan founded "The Facebook" while attending Harvard University, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service which allowed them a convenient way to keep in touch with each other. It quickly expanded to MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This expansion continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools.

In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners. On August 23, 2005, Aboutface Corporation sold the domain name facebook.com to Facebook for $200,000. The website moved to this new domain name and dropped "the" from its name. As a part of the move, the site was overhauled to make profile pages more user-friendly. Then, on September 2, 2005, Zuckerberg launched the high school iteration of Facebook, calling it the next logical thing to do.

On Aug 22, Facebook introduced Facebook Notes, a blogging feature with tagging, embedded images, and other features, also allowing the importation of blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. This newly added feature also included the common blog feature of allowing readers to comment on users' entries. On September 11, 2006, Facebook became open to all users of the Internet, prompting protest from its existing user base. Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address. On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as Facebook Platform.

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place for the acquisition of the social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion. In October, after Google purchased video-sharing site YouTube, rumors circulated that Google had offered $2.3 billion to outbid Yahoo! Peter Thiel, a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to that of Viacom's MTV brand and based on shared target demographic audience.