The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. Harvard at that time did not have a student "facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information), though individual houses had been issuing their own paper facebooks since the mid-1980s. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images. Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by some university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Nevertheless, Facebook's market growth started to stall in some regions, with the site losing 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011. According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 an estimated 41.6% (129.5 million) of the U.S. Quantcast estimates Facebook has 138.9 million monthly unique U.S. Entertainment Weekly included the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Critics, such as Facebook Detox, state that Facebook has turned into a national obsession in the United States, resulting in vast amounts of time lost and encouraging narcissism.
Ī January 2009 study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users. In May 2005, Accel partners invested $12.7 million in Facebook, and Jim Breyer added $1 million of his own money to the pot.Īccording to a May 2011 Consumer Reports survey, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts and 5 million under 10, violating the site's terms of service. Facebook now allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the site. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and over. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People From Work" or "Close Friends".įacebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.
Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users, more than half of whom use Facebook on a mobile device.
Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 2004, owned and operated by Facebook, Inc.