How Facebook Happened
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and three of his classmates while they were students at Harvard University in 2003.
According to the latest Facebook entry on Wikipedia, “(m)embership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service. In March, 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.
“This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.
“Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president. In June, 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.”
Facebook hosts over 350 million active users (Facebook) worldwide as of January 2010. Were Facebook a country, it would be the third most populous after China and India (Economist). It dominates all other social networks, and its audience continues to grow each day. The average user visits at least once a day and spends 55 minutes interacting with friends and family on the site.
Why Is Facebook So Popular?
Facebook’s growth can be attributed to the “network effect” – a phrase originally used to describe the rapid growth of telephones.
The “network effect” states that the value of a communications network to its users rises exponentially with the number of people connected to it (Economist).
Two measures of its activity are very revealing:
• Through the ads displayed on the site, Facebook took in over $435 million by October 2009.
• Over 2.5 billion photos are uploaded each month by users.
The Facebook Wall
Status updates, comments back and forth between your connections and you, and other items you post are shown on your Wall.
Your Wall is where your “social graph” is visible to you. Your “social graph” is which people are nodes in your network, and the links between people are friendships.
The more your “social graph” grows, the more insights you can have into the relationships you have and those around you. By seeing what matters to people, you can profit from this knowledge by understanding better how to participate in and contribute to conversations.
The Wall is a chronological stream of your activity, viewable by others connected directly with you on Facebook.
Think of the Wall as your personal bulletin board where others can post items of interest to you, where you can share items with others (photos, music, videos, news articles – anything online).
This is the primary way you interact with your network on Facebook: by reading the News Feed and Status Updates, you can watch and comment on other people’s status updates throughout the day.
If LinkedIn is your professional, office persona, then Facebook is your happy hour, off-hours persona that rounds you out as a complete person.
While you will have friends and connections on both LinkedIn and Facebook, you will want to use your judgment to determine if your LinkedIn contacts are suitable connections for the non-career aspects of your life.
It’s Not Just Profiles: Groups Count Too
In addition to creating a profile and connecting with the people you know, Facebook offers Groups as a central gathering spot for those interested in or supporting a given topic. Whether it’s a political activity, an upcoming event, neighborhood association or other point in common, Facebook Groups are created and maintained by members. Most feature open membership so you can join and leave Groups at will.
When people began trying to connect with brands, artists, and businesses on Facebook, Groups was not the best tool for that need. That’s why Pages were created.
Pages Are Profiles for Companies
In response, Facebook developed Pages in 2009 as a commercial alternative for companies and brands to promote their products and services on the site. As of January 2010, over 1.6 million Pages have been created. Members “Fan” the company’s Page and receive updates from the organization.
While Pages, and social media marketing in general, have met with mixed success, some companies such as Coke, Dell, and NPR have used them to great effect to enhance interest and participation in their brands.
Want the Low Down on the 101?
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