What Is Facebook?

Facebook is a social networking website. To flesh out this definition a bit more, it’s an online community—a place where people can meet and interact; swap photos, videos, and other information; and generally connect with friends, family, coworkers, fellow students, fellow hobbyists and enthusiasts, and numerous others in their social network. Facebook connects people within cities or regions, work or school, home or abroad, and so on. Built on an architecture of profile pages that allow individual users to share information about themselves and communicate with others, Facebook seeks to create an environment in which members log in regularly to keep track of what friends and colleagues are doing, share their own activities, interact about interests and hobbies, send messages, and join groups and networks—just to name a few things.

Facebook is fast becoming the most popular social networking site on the Internet, quickly surpassing the previous leader, MySpace, in the number of registered users. Offering free access and dozens of tools for connecting people in social, school, and workplace environments, Facebook has over 200 million active users and is growing, with 100 million logging in daily to use the site. Over 30 million users access Facebook through mobile devices. Perhaps you’re wondering at this point why so many people are flocking to Facebook? That’s easy—it’s incredibly simple to use.

What started out as a college-based social network site, two-thirds of Facebook’s members are now outside of the college startup base and include users of all ages and walks of life. In other words, Facebook isn’t just for college kids anymore. One of the fastest-growing segments of users is the 35–54-year-old crowd.

Facebook is also a global phenomenon. Over 40 translations of the site are up and running, with more in development. 70% of users are outside the U.S., but those numbers are changing as Facebook rapidly catches on in the states.

At its heart, Facebook is all about connecting people with people. Facebook users do a variety of things with the site: track news about friends far and wide; make new friends centered around common interests; share photos, music, links, and videos; organize and invite people to events; play games; spread the word about charities and causes; buy and sell stuff; market products; and much, much more.

As a website, Facebook is accessible to all Internet users, where permitted. In addition to connecting people, third-party developers are creating a wide variety of applications—programs that run within the Facebook framework—to entertain and inform. Applications range from the silly to the serious, and new ones are added each day. What makes Facebook such a huge hit is its features and tools, and the willingness of its users to network with each other in their communities locally and globally.

Source of Information : Sams Teach Yourself Facebook in 10 Minutes (2009)

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