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| Dear
Ron, |
Facebook was founded in early 2004. In October, 2007,
Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share in Facebook for $240 million.
Facebook is today's hottest Internet company.
What do they do and why are they so hot?
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| What
is Facebook |
Facebook is a social networking website
founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a
former Harvard student. Initially membership was restricted to
students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to
MIT, Boston University, Boston College, 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 in
early 2006 and then for some large companies. Since September
2006, anyone 13 or older may join. Users can join one or more
participating networks, such as a high school, place of
employment, or geographic region. In 2007 working adults were
joining at the fastest rate
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| Facebook Origins, Expansion, and
Operations |
 Mark Zuckerberg founded
"The Facebook" in February 2004, 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. At that time, Zuckerberg was joined
by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook
expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.
This expansion
continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy
League and a few other schools. At the end of the school year,
Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California with
McCollum, who had a summer internship at Electronic Arts. They
rented a house near Stanford University where they were joined by
Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker. Soon McCollum decided to leave EA and
help with the development of Facebook and a companion website,
Wirehog, full-time.
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| Facebook
History 2005 -2007 |
2005
In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.8
million in venture capital from Accel Partners. On August 23, 2005,
Facebook bought the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface
Corporation for $200,000 and dropped "the" from its name. At that
time the site was overhauled, a change intended to make profile
pages more user-friendly, according to Zuckerberg. Also that month
McCollum went back to Harvard although he continued to serve as a
consultant and returned to work on staff during the summers. As
before, Hughes remained in Cambridge while he performed his duties
as company spokesperson.
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| Site
Features |
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The Wall
The Wall
is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post
messages for the user to see. One user's wall is visible to anyone
with the ability to see their full profile, and different users'
wall posts show up in an individual's News Feed. Many users use
their friend's walls for leaving short, temporal notes. More private
discourse is saved for Messages, which are sent to a person's Inbox,
and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the Message,
much like email.
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| Facebook
Applications |
On May 24, 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which
provides a framework for developers to create applications that
interact with core Facebook features. Even games such as chess and
Scrabble are available. As of December 5, 2007, there are more than
10,000 applications. Third-party websites such as Adonomics, which provides
application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook and Face Reviews have sprung up
in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. On July
4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the
"Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund," becoming the world's first
Facebook-only venture capital firm.
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| Using
Facebook to Promote your Organisation |
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