Facebook is one of the most popular social network services in the world, with more than 150 million “active users,” more than 70% of them living in countries other than the United States. Founded in early 2004, the site was originally designed to provide college students with networking services. A “facebook” is a paper guide for university students that includes freshman photos and names to help incoming students get acclimated and begin building friendships. 

Facebook outgrew its initial charter by 2006, as its early members graduated and entered the work world. While it still offers facebooks for individual colleges, half its members are at the end of 2008 were not at universities — the fastest-growing group is people older than 30. The site has introduced a set of tools, called application programming interfaces, that can be used to build software that extends Facebook features to other sites as well as incorporate features into the site itself. The company claims that as many as 52,000 software applications have been built on the Facebook Platform.

It is commonplace today to see Facebook members use their Profile page, which lists their current and past Facebook status messages, to aggregate feeds from other social sites, such as Twitter and Ping.fm. An initial wave of early adult users has spread word of the service and it is typical to find professional organizations, companies and recreational groups using Facebook as their primary channel for online communication.

 

In addition to the user’s Profile page, the Home page for each member displays recent activity by friends and groups joined through Facebook. This makes the site a popular hangout where connections are rediscovered or strengthened because members have shared photos, video and blog postings that attracted attention of old friends or people who share common interests. 

Facebook provides calendar sharing with invitation services to help groups get together in physical venues, “cause” groups that help catalyze movements through members’ social connections, and a variety of media and social features.

The varied ways to view and organize feeds within Facebook take some time to learn. For example, there is a tab called “Boxes” on the Profile page that is there only to accommodate applications that are displayed within a box on the site. It could be made a lot easier to use, but many people might find this to be the definition of “flexiblity” and enjoy tinkering with all the options.

Once you’ve joined Facebook, be ready to learn a few new concepts:

• Poke-Members can send a “poke” to let others know they thought of them, but these can also become a nuisance if people who “poke back” receive an automatic poke in reply. It leads to long strings of contentless messages
• Groups-While “groups” are a common idea, their use by Facebook members varies from the one-time event to permanent assemblies dedicated issues of local, national or international importance. It is very easy to be overwhelmed with invitations and keeping up with lots of groups.
• Friend-”Friend” doesn’t necessarily mean someone you know or have ever met. At least, not to many people on Facebook. It is perfectly acceptable to say “no” to an invitation to become friends. Some members claim to have thousands of friends, but would be hard-pressed to recognize those people if they met in person or, even, in Facebook. 

Facebook operates on advertising revenue and uses personal information to place ads on Home, Profile and other member pages. To change your preferences to limit access to your information by other members and the applications you use, open the Settings and select the Profile button. The site also lets you block individuals. Applications, however, can gain access to your profile if you give them permission unless you visit the Applications settings and select specific kinds of data you will let applications collect or the “Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API” option. 

Home Page: Facebook.com
A popular social network with members worldwide.

Free

Tags: college, friend lists, messaging, photo-sharing, professional network, social network, video-sharing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.