Friday, April 9, 2010

Assignment 2-1: Weekly Written Analysis 2


Facebook

What is Facebook? “Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc” (Wikipedia, 2010).
The social networking site was invented in February of 2004 as a means of college interaction by a Junior Harvard student by the name of Mark Zuckerberg (and his friends) in his dorm room. It was preceded the prior year by his site called Facemash where he matched the faces of fellow students with farm animals which did not go over well with Harvard officials.

Facebook’s intended audience was originally meant only for Harvard college students, but was opened later for other area Ivy League colleges as well. Today, as of 2006, you must be over the age of thirteen with a valid e-mail address to be a Facebook user.

People who are registered users of the product are able to set up personal profiles which may contain photos, photo albums, list personal interests, contact information and more. The product has many applications like Chess which allows users to play interactive online games with friends, a Gifts section where you can buy virtual gifts for one dollar that can be personalized to give to friends. There is a Marketplace section to place free classified ads, an Events section to post upcoming events for users and a Video section to share home videos.

Communication can be done with people you know who are users by “friending” them. Communication with “friends” and other users can be allowed in incremental degrees. There is public messaging and private messaging and different levels of “friending” which allow the user to choose how much information they want other users to see. There is also a chat application. Users may develop and sign up with special interest or fan groups, some of which are posted by businesses to use as a modern mode of marketing their companies and products to a younger audience.

Facebook has made a large impact on the world in general, but especially on politics in the last presidential election. According to Wikipedia, “over one million people installed the Facebook application 'US politics' in order to take part (Wikipedia, 2010). During the election the debates’ user responses were measured regarding candidate issues and comments. The results showed the world something “…what young students had already experienced: that Facebook was an extremely popular and powerful new way to interact and voice opinions” (Wikipedia, 2010). Extremely popular is right. Facebook’s audience in the United States alone is “over twenty-three million users” strong and growing according Inside Facebook, a website that tracks statistics for the company (Inside Facebook, 2009).



References
Inside Facebook, (2009). Retrieved from http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/03/25/number-of-us-facebook-users-over-35-nearly-doubles-in-last-60-days/
Wikipedia, (April 10, 2010). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceBook

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