Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, inc.. Facebook has more than 600 million active users.Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerburg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduarin Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students. It was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy, Leage and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students. Finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.
Facebook has been met with controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Vietnam, Iran, and Pakistan on different bases. For example, it was banned in many countries of the world on the basis of allowed content judged as anti-Islamic and containing religious discrimination. It has also been banned at many workplaces to prevent the wasting of employees' time. The privacy of facebook users has also been an issue, and the safety of user accounts has been compromised several times. Facebook has settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.
In many ways, Facebook has impacted on the social life and activity of people. One of such impacts is with the ability to reunite lost family members and friends. One of such reunion was between John Watson, who had spent the last 20 years searching for his long lost daughter. The two met on Facebook as father found her profile. Another father-daughter reunion happened between Tony Macnauton and Frances Simpson who had not seen each other for nearly 48 years.
In February 2008, a Facebook group called "One Million Voices Against FARC" organized an event that saw hundreds of thousands of Columbians march in protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, better known as the FARC. In August 2010, one of North Korea's official government websites, Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook. In 2010 an English director of public health, whose staff was researching Syphilis, linked and attributed a rise in Syphilis cases in areas of Britain to Facebook. The reports of this research were rebuked by Facebook as "ignoring the difference between correlations and causation."
No comments:
Post a Comment