Wednesday, January 5, 2011

twitter

Twitter, Inc.
Type Private
Founded San Francisco, California, United States
Founder Jack Dorsey
Evan Williams
Biz Stone
Headquarters 795 Folsom St., Suite 600, San Francisco, CA 94107[1], United States
Area served Worldwide
Key people Jack Dorsey (Chairman)
Dick Costolo (CEO)
Evan Williams (Product Strategy)
Biz Stone (Creative Director)
Revenue US $150 million (projected 2010)[2]
Employees 351 (2010)[3]
Slogan What's happening?
Website twitter.com
Alexa rank 10 (November 2010[update])[4]
Type of site mobile social network service, microblogging
Registration Required
Users 190 million (accounts, not visitors)[5]
Available in Multilingual
English, Spanish, Japanese, German, French, and Italian
Launched July 15, 2006[6]
Current status Active
Screenshot[show]
Twitter home page

Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. Users may subscribe to other users' tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.[7]

All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.[8] While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees. The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts.

Since its creation in March 2006 and its launch in July 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and currently has more than 175 million users.[9] It is estimated that Twitter has 190 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.[10] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."[11]

Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Invention
1.2 Reaction
1.3 Leadership
1.4 Growth
2 Overview
2.1 Messages
2.2 Tweet contents
2.3 Rankings
2.4 Adding and following content
2.5 Authentication
2.6 Demographics
3 Finances
4 Technology
4.1 Implementation
4.2 Interface
4.3 Outages
4.4 Privacy and security
4.4.1 "MouseOver" exploit
4.5 Open source
5 t.co
5.1 History
6 Reception
6.1 Change of focus
6.2 Criticism
7 Alleged censoring of Trending Results
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

[edit] History
A blueprint sketch, circa 2006, by Jack Dorsey, envisioning an SMS-based social network.[edit] InventionTwitter's origins lie in a "daylong brainstorming session" that was held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. While sitting in a park on a children’s slide and eating Mexican food, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.[12] The original project code name for the service was twttr, inspired by Flickr and the five character length of American SMS short codes. The developers initially considered "10958" as a short code, but later changed it to "40404" for "ease of use and memorability."[13] Work on the project started on March 21, 2006, when Dorsey published the first Twitter message at 9:50 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST): "just setting up my twttr."[14]

[W]e came across the word "twitter," and it was just perfect. The definition was "a short burst of inconsequential information," and "chirps from birds." And that’s exactly what the product was.
—Jack Dorsey[15]
The first Twitter prototype was used as an internal service for Odeo employees and the full version was introduced publicly on July 15, 2006.[6] In October 2006, Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Dorsey, and other members of Odeo formed Obvious Corporation and acquired Odeo and all of its assets–including Odeo.com and Twitter.com–from the investors and shareholders.[16] Twitter spun off into its own company in April 2007.[17]

[edit] ReactionThe tipping point for Twitter's popularity was the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. During the event Twitter usage increased from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000.[18] "The Twitter people cleverly placed two 60-inch plasma screens in the conference hallways, exclusively streaming Twitter messages," remarked Newsweek's Steven Levy. "Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it."[19]

Reaction at the festival was highly positive. Blogger Scott Beale said that Twitter "absolutely rul[ed]" SXSW. Social software researcher Danah Boyd said Twitter "own[ed]" the festival.[20] Twitter staff received the festival's Web Award prize with the remark "we'd like to thank you in 140 characters or less. And we just did!"[21]


Previous Twitter logo, used until September 14, 2010.The first unassisted off-Earth Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010.[22] By late November 2010 an average of a dozen updates per day was posted on the astronauts' communal account, @NASA_Astronauts.

In August 2010, the company appointed Adam Bain as President of Revenue from News Corp. Fox Audience Network.[23]

On September 14, 2010, Twitter launched a redesigned site including a new logo.[24]

[edit] LeadershipAs CEO, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who back the company.[25] On October 16, 2008[26] Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.[27] On October 4, 2010, Williams announced that he was stepping down as CEO. Dick Costolo, formerly COO of Twitter, took over Williams' position. Williams will stay with the company and “be completely focused on product strategy.”[28]

[edit] GrowthTwitter had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. By the end of 2009, two billion tweets per quarter were being posted.[citation needed] In February 2010 Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day.[29] By March 2010, Twitter recorded over 70,000 registered applications, according to the company.[30] In the first quarter of 2010, 4 billion tweets were posted.[citation needed] As of June 2010, about 65 million tweets are posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second, according to Twitter.[31] Twitter has experienced rapid growth as noted on Compete.com, Twitter has moved up to the 3rd highest ranking social networking site in January 2009 from its previous rank of 22nd.[32]

Twitter's usage spikes during prominent events. For example, a record was set during the 2010 FIFA World Cup when fans wrote 2,940 tweets per second in the 30 second period after Japan scored against Cameroon on 14 June 2010. The record was broken again when 3,085 tweets a second were posted after the Los Angeles Lakers' victory in the 2010 NBA Finals on 17 June 2010.[33] When American singer Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, Twitter servers crashed after users were updating their status to include the words "Michael Jackson" at a rate of 100,000 tweets per hour.[34]

Twitter acquired application developer Atebits on April 11, 2010. Atebits had developed the Apple Design Award-winning Twitter client Tweetie for Mac and iPhone. The application, now called "Twitter" and distributed free of charge, is the official Twitter client for the iPhone.[35]

From September through October 2010, Twitter began rolling out 'New Twitter'. This was an entirely revamped edition of twitter.com. Changes include the ability to see pictures and videos without leaving Twitter itself by clicking on individual tweets which contain links to images and clips from a variety of supported websites (YouTube, Flickr etc.), as well as a complete overhaul of the interface, which shifted links such as '@mentions' and 'Retweets' above the Twitter stream, while 'Messages and 'Log Out' are now accessible via a black bar at the very top of twitter.com. As of November 1, Twitter confirmed that the 'New Twitter experience' had been rolled out to all users. Existing users still have the opportunity to opt out if they dislike the new interface, and go back to using the old-style Twitter. This overhaul did not have any effect on third-party applications such as TweetDeck.

[edit] OverviewTechnology author Steven Johnson describes the basic mechanics of Twitter as "remarkably simple:"[36]

As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education.
Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.[37]

[edit] MessagesUsers can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags — words or phrases prefixed with a #.[38] Similarly, the @ sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users.[39]

In late 2009, the "Twitter Lists" feature was added, making it possible for users to follow (as well as mention and reply to) lists of authors instead of individual authors.[7][40]

In January, 2010, MIT alumnus and astronaut Timothy Creamer sent the very first live tweet from space.[41]

Through SMS, users can communicate with Twitter through five gateway numbers: short codes for the United States, Canada, India, New Zealand, and an Isle of Man-based number for international use. There is also a short code in the United Kingdom which is only accessible to those on the Vodafone, O2[42] and Orange[43] networks. In India, since Twitter only supports tweets from Bharti Airtel,[44] an alternative platform called smsTweet[45] was set up by a user to work on all networks.[46] A similar platform called GladlyCast[47] exists for mobile phone users in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

The messages were initially set to 140-character limit for compatibility with SMS messaging, introducing the shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also increased the usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic, memozu.com and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters. Twitter uses bit.ly for automatic shortening of all URLs posted on its website.[48]

[edit] Tweet contents
Content of Tweets according to Pear Analytics.[49]
News
Spam
Self-promotion
Pointless babble
Conversational
Pass-along valueSan Antonio-based market research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a 2-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:[49]

Pointless babble — 40%
Conversational — 38%
Pass-along value — 9%
Self-promotion — 6%
Spam — 4%
News — 4%[49]
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled "pointless babble" is better characterized as "social grooming" and/or "peripheral awareness" (which she explains as persons "want[ing] to know what the people around them are thinking and doing and feeling, even when co-presence isn’t viable").[50]

[edit] RankingsTwitter is ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis.[51] Daily user estimates vary as the company does not publish statistics on active accounts. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits.[52] In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing website in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had annual growth of 1,382%, increasing from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. It was followed by Zimbio with 240% increase, and Facebook with 228% increase.[53] However, Twitter has a user retention rate of 40%.[54]

[edit] Adding and following contentThere are numerous tools for adding content, monitoring content and conversations including Tweetdeck, Salesforce.com, HootSuite, and Twitterfeed.[55] Less than half of tweets are posted using the web user interface with most users using third-party applications (based on analysis of 500 million tweets by Sysomos).[56]

[edit] AuthenticationAs of August 31, 2010, third-party Twitter applications are required to use OAuth, an authentication method that does not require users to enter their password into the authenticating application. Previously, the OAuth authentication method was optional, it is now compulsory and the user-name/password authentication method has been made redundant and is no longer functional. Twitter stated that the move to OAuth will mean "increased security and a better experience."[57]

[edit] DemographicsTwitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, says Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said.[58] According to comScore only 11% of Twitter's users are aged 12 to 17.[58] comScore attributes this to Twitter's "early adopter period" when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore as of late, has stated that Twitter has begun to "filter more into the mainstream", and "along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher joined the ranks of the Twitterati."[59]

According to a study by Sysomos in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men — 53% over 47%. It also stated that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.[60]

According to Quancast, 27 million people in the US used Twitter as of 09/03/2009. 63% of Twitter users are less than 35 years old, 60% of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (16%) and Hispanic (11%); 58% of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60K.[61]

[edit] Finances
Twitter's San Francisco headquarters located at 795 Folsom St.Twitter raised over US$57 million from venture capitalist growth funding, although exact numbers are not publicly disclosed. Twitter's first A round of funding was for an undisclosed amount that is rumored to have been between $1 million and $5 million.[62] Its second B round of funding in 2008 was for $22 million[63] and its third C round of funding in 2009 was for $35 million from Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital along with an undisclosed amount from other investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and Insight Venture Partners.[62] Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions.[64]

The Industry Standard has remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue.[65] Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.[66]

On April 13, 2010, Twitter announced plans to offer paid advertising for companies that would be able to purchase "promoted tweets" to appear in selective search results on the Twitter website, similar to Google Adwords' advertising model. As of April 13, Twitter announced it had already signed up a number of companies wishing to advertise including Sony Pictures, Red Bull, Best Buy, and Starbucks.[67][68]

Some of Twitter's revenue and user growth documents were illegally published on TechCrunch by the hacker Croll Hacker. The documents projected 2009 revenues of $400,000 in the third quarter and $4 million in the fourth quarter along with 25 million users by the end of the year. The projections for the end of 2013 were $1.54 billion in revenue, $111 million in net earnings, and 1 billion users.[2] No information about how Twitter plans to achieve those numbers has been published. In response, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone published a blog post suggesting the possibility of legal action against the hacker.[69]

Twitter has been identified as a possible candidate for an IPO by 2013.[70]

[edit] Technology[edit] ImplementationThe Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework,[71] deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby.[72]

From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling,[73] but since 2009 implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala.[74] The service's application programming interface (API) allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.[75][76]

[edit] InterfaceOn April 30, 2009, Twitter adjusted its web interface, adding a search bar and a sidebar of "trending topics" — the most common phrases appearing in messages. Biz Stone explains that all messages are instantly indexed and that "with this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important — a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now."[77]

[edit] Outages
The Twitter fail whale error message.When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the "fail whale" error message image created by Yiying Lu,[78] illustrating several red birds using a net to hoist a whale from the ocean captioned "Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again."[79]

Twitter had approximately 98% uptime in 2007 (or about six full days of downtime).[80] The downtime was particularly noticeable during events popular with the technology industry such as the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote address.[81][82]

May 2008 Twitter's new engineering team made architectural changes to deal with the scale of growth. Stability issues resulted in down time or temporary feature removal.
August 2008, Twitter withdrew free SMS services from users in the United Kingdom[83] and for approximately five months instant messaging support via a XMPP bot was listed as being "temporarily unavailable".[84]
October 10, 2008, Twitter's status blog announced that instant messaging (IM) service was no longer a temporary outage and needed to be revamped. It was announced that Twitter aims to return its IM service pending necessary major work.[85]
June 12, 2009, in what was called a potential "Twitpocalypse", the unique numerical identifier associated with each tweet exceeded the limit of 32-bit signed integers (2,147,483,647 total messages).[86] While Twitter itself was not affected, some third-party clients could no longer access recent tweets. Patches were quickly released, though some iPhone applications had to wait for approval from the App Store.[87]
September 22, the identifier exceeded the limit for 32-bit unsigned integers (4,294,967,296 total messages) again breaking some third-party clients.[88]
August 6, 2009, Twitter and Facebook suffered from a denial-of-service attack, causing the Twitter website to go offline for several hours.[89] It was later confirmed that the attacks were directed at one pro-Georgian user around the anniversary of the 2008 South Ossetia War, rather than the sites themselves.[90]
17 December 2009 a hacking attack replaced the website's welcoming screen with an image of a green flag and the caption "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army" for nearly an hour. No connection between the hackers and Iran has been established.[91]
November 2010 A number of accounts encountered a fault that resulted in them seeing the 'fail whale' when they tried to login to their accounts. The accounts themselves weren't locked out as account holders could still see their 'mentions' page and post from there. But the timeline and a number of other features were unavailable during this outage (which remains ongoing).
[edit] Privacy and securityTwitter collects personally identifiable information about its users and shares it with third parties. The service reserves the right to sell this information as an asset if the company changes hands.[92] While Twitter displays no advertising, advertisers can target users based on their history of tweets and may quote tweets in ads[93] directed specifically to the user.

A security vulnerability was reported on April 7, 2007, by Nitesh Dhanjani and Rujith. Since Twitter used the phone number of the sender of an SMS message as authentication, malicious users could update someone else's status page by using SMS spoofing.[94] The vulnerability could be used if the spoofer knew the phone number registered to their victim's account. Within a few weeks of this discovery Twitter introduced an optional personal identification number (PIN) that its users could use to authenticate their SMS-originating messages.[95]

On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a dictionary attack.[96] Falsified tweets — including sexually explicit and drug-related messages — were sent from these accounts.[97]

Twitter launched the beta version of their "Verified Accounts" service on June 11, 2009, allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status.[98]

In May 2010, a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other user's knowledge. For example, comedian Conan O'Brien's account, which had been set to follow only one person was changed to receive nearly 200 malicious subscriptions.[99]

In response to Twitter's security breaches, the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against the service which were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users' private information, including maintenance of a "comprehensive information security program" to be independently audited biannually.[100]

[edit] "MouseOver" exploitOn 21 September 2010, an XSS Worm became active on Twitter. When an account user held the mouse cursor over blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader's account.[101] The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites.

The origin is unclear but Pearce H. Delphin (known on Twitter as @zzap) and a Scandinavian developer, Magnus Holm, both claim to have modified the exploit of a user, possibly Masato Kinugawa, who was using it to create coloured Tweets.[102] Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, reported the XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14. Later, when he found it was exploitable again, he created the account 'RainbowTwtr' and used it to post coloured messages.[102]

Delphin says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a JavaScript function for "onMouseOver",[102] and Holm later created and posted the XSS Worm that automatically re-tweeted itself.[101]

Accounts affected by the virus included Sarah Brown, wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Security firm Sophos reported the virus was spread by people doing it for "fun and games", but noted it could be exploited by cybercriminals.[103] Twitter issued a statement on their status blog at 13:50 UTC that "The exploit is fully patched".[101][104] Twitter representative Carolyn Penner has expressed that they will not be pressing charges over this incident.[105]

[edit] Open sourceTwitter released several open source projects developed while overcoming technical challenges of their service.[106] Notable projects are the Gizzard Scala framework for creating distributed datastores and the distributed graph database FlockDB.

[edit] t.cot.co is a URL shortening service created by Twitter.[107] It is only available for links posted to Twitter and not available for general use.[107] Eventually all links posted to Twitter will use a t.co wrapper.[108]

Twitter hopes that the service will be able to protect users from malicious sites,[107] and will use it to track clicks on links within tweets.[107][109]

[edit] HistoryHaving previously used the services of third parties TinyURL and bit.ly,[110] Twitter began experimenting with its own URL shortening service for direct messages in March 2010 using the twt.tl domain,[108] before it purchased the t.co domain.

The service is being tested on the main site using the accounts @TwitterAPI, @rsarver and @raffi.[108]

On 2 September 2010 an email from Twitter to users said they would be expanding the roll-out of the service to users.

[edit] Reception[edit] Change of focus
The mobile version of twitter.comTwitter emphasized their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question asked users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?"[111][112] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Limiting yourself to 140 characters—the maximum for messages on this diabolically addictive social-networking tool—is easy."[113]

On November 22, 2010, Biz Stone expressed for the first time the idea of a Twitter news network,[114] a concept of wire-like news service he has been working on for years.[115]

[edit] CriticismThe Wall Street Journal wrote that social-networking services such as Twitter "elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel 'too' connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."[116]

"Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad", said tech writer Bruce Sterling.[117] "For many people, the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd," hypothesized writer Clive Thompson. "Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme—the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world."[118]

On the other hand Steve Dotto opines that part of Twitter's appeal is the challenge of trying to publish such messages in tight constraints.[119] "The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful," says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School.[120]

Nielsen Online reports that Twitter has a user retention rate of 40%. Many people stop using the service after a month therefore the site may potentially reach only about 10% of all Internet users.[121] In 2009, Twitter won the "Breakout of the Year" Webby Award.[122][123]

During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, Daniel Schorr stated that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin gave Schorr two examples of breaking news stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories.[124]

In an episode of The Daily Show on February 26, 2009, guest Brian Williams described tweets as only referring to the condition of the author. Williams implied that he would never use Twitter because nothing he did was interesting enough to publish in Twitter format.[125] During another episode of The Daily Show on March 2, 2009, host Jon Stewart negatively portrayed members of Congress who chose to "tweet" during President Obama's address to Congress (on February 24, 2009) rather than pay attention to the content of the speech. The show's Samantha Bee satirized media coverage of the service saying "there's no surprise young people love it — according to reports of young people by middle-aged people."[126] The influence of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have huge influences on today's youth. Time magazine has acknowledged growing level of influence in their 2010 Time 100 most influential people. To determine the influence of people they used a formula based on famous social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. The list ranges from Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey to Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher. The formula is (Twitter followers) x 2 + (facebook connections) divided by 2.[127]

In March 2009, the comic strip Doonesbury began to satirize Twitter. Many characters highlighted the triviality of tweets although one defended the need to keep up with the constant-update trend.[128] SuperNews! similarly satirized Twitter as an addiction to "constant self-affirmation" and said tweets were nothing more than "shouts into the darkness hoping someone is listening".[129]

In August 2010, South Korea tried to block certain content on Twitter due to the North Korean government opening a Twitter account.[130] The North Korean Twitter account created on August 12, @uriminzok, loosely translated to mean "our people" in Korean, acquired over 4,500 followers in less than one week. On August 19, 2010, South Korea's state-run Communications Standards Commission banned the Twitter account for broadcasting "illegal information."[131] According to BBC US and Canada, experts claim that North Korea has invested in "information technology for more than 20 years" with knowledge of how to use social networking sites to their power.[132] This appears to be "nothing new" for North Korea as the reclusive country has always published propaganda in its press, usually against South Korea, calling them "warmongers."[132] With only 36 tweets, the Twitter account was able to accumulate almost 9,000 followers. To date, the South Korean Commission has banned 65 sites, including this Twitter account.[131]

Twitter is banned in China; however, many Chinese people use it anyway. In 2010 Cheng Jianping was sentenced to 1 year in a labor camp for a sarcastic post on Twitter.[133]

[edit] Alleged censoring of Trending ResultsIn December 2010, allegations have been made by several IT-news websites and other media reporting that Twitter appeared to engage in censorship activities by impeding WikiLeaks related tweets from becoming trending topics, despite high numbers of tweets concerning WikiLeaks due to activities such as the United States diplomatic cables leak. [134] [135] [136] However, Twitter has denied any involvement with altering Trend results explaining that "WikiLeaks and cablegate have trended worldwide or in specific locations."[137]

[edit] See alsoAmbient Awareness
Comparison of micro-blogging services
Facebook
Blauk
List of Twitter services and applications
Myspace
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine
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134.^ [1] washingtonpost.com on 2010 12 06
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137.^ [2]

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facebook

Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] As of July 2010[update] Facebook has more than 500 million active users,[6][7][N 1] Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[8] 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. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network service by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[9] Entertainment Weekly put it 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?"[10] Quantcast estimates Facebook has 135.1 million monthly unique U.S. visitors.[11]

Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Controversies and criticism
3 Company
4 Website
5 Reception
6 Political impact
7 In media
8 See also
9 Notes
10 References
11 External links

HistoryMain articles: History of Facebook and Timeline of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. According to The Harvard Crimson, the site was comparable to Hot or Not,[12] and "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person".[13]


Mark Zuckerberg co-created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network, and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student "facebook" (a directory with photos and basic information). Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online.[13][14]

The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion. Ultimately, however, the charges were dropped.[15] Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final, by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section.[14] He opened the site up to his classmates, and people started sharing their notes.

The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident.[16] On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook", originally located at thefacebook.com.[17]

Six days after the site launched, three Harvard seniors, Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accused Zuckerberg of intentionally misleading them into believing he would help them build a social network called HarvardConnection.com, while he was instead using their ideas to build a competing product.[18] The three complained to the Harvard Crimson, and the newspaper began an investigation. The three later filed a lawsuit against Zuckerberg, subsequently settling.[19]

Membership 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.[20] Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[21] It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[22][23]

Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004, and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company's president.[24] In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California.[21] It received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.[25] The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.[26]

Total active users[N 1] (in millions) Date Users Days later Monthly growth[N 2]
02008-08-26 August 26, 2008 &0000000000000100000000100[27] &00000000000016650000001,665 178.38%
02009-04-08 April 8, 2009 &0000000000000200000000200[28] &0000000000000225000000225 13.33%
02009-09-15 September 15, 2009 &0000000000000300000000300[29] &0000000000000150000000150 10%
02010-02-05 February 5, 2010 &0000000000000400000000400[30] &0000000000000143000000143 6.99%
02010-07-21 July 21, 2010 &0000000000000500000000500[6] &0000000000000166000000166 4.52%
— &0000000000000600000000600 &0000000000000167000000167 (ongoing) —

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[31] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join.[32] Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[33] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid email address.[34][35]

On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion.[36] Microsoft's purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook.[37] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.[38] In September 2009, Facebook said that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time.[39] In November 2010, based on SecondMarket Inc., an exchange for shares of privately held companies, Facebook's value was $41 billion (surpassing eBay's slightly) and it became the third-largest US Web Company after Google and Amazon.[40] Facebook has been identified as a possible candidate for an IPO by 2013.[41]

Traffic to Facebook increased steadily after 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010.[42] Facebook also became the top social network across eight individual markets in Asia—the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top positions in certain markets, including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea, and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc in Taiwan.[citation needed]

Wikinews has related news: Facebook reaches 500 million users

Controversies and criticismMain article: Criticism of Facebook
Facebook has been met with controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's Republic of China,[43] Vietnam,[44] Iran,[45] Uzbekistan[46], Pakistan,[47] Syria,[48] and Bangladesh[49] on different basis. For example on the basis of Anti-Islamic and religious discrimination content allowed by Facebook, it was banned in many countries of the world. It has also been banned at many workplaces to prevent the wasting of employees' time.[50] The privacy of Facebook users has also been an issue, and the safety of user accounts has been compromised several times. Facebook has settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.[51]

Company
Entrance to Facebook's current headquarters in the Stanford Research Park, Palo Alto, California.Most of Facebook's revenues comes from advertising. Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising,[52] and as such Facebook only serves advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory. According to comScore, an internet marketing research company, Facebook collects as much data from its visitors as Google and Microsoft, but considerably less than Yahoo!.[53] In 2010, the security team began expanding its efforts to counter threats and terrorism from users.[54] On November 6, 2007, Facebook launched Facebook Beacon, which was an ultimately failed attempt to advertise to friends of users using the knowledge of what purchases friends made.

Facebook generally has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) for advertisements than most major websites. For banner advertisements, they have generally received one-fifth the number of clicks on Facebook compared to the Web as a whole.[55] This means that a smaller percentage of Facebook's users click on advertisements than many other large websites. For example, while Google users click on the first advertisement for search results an average of 8% of the time (80,000 clicks for every one million searches),[56] Facebook's users click on advertisements an average of 0.04% of the time (400 clicks for every one million pages).[57]

Sarah Smith, who was Facebook's Online Sales Operations Manager, confirmed that successful advertising campaigns can have clickthrough rates as low as 0.05% to 0.04%, and that CTR for ads tend to fall within two weeks.[58] Competing social network MySpace's CTR, in comparison, is about 0.1%, 2.5 times better than Facebook's but still low compared to many other websites. Explanations for Facebook's low CTR include the fact that Facebook's users are more technologically savvy and therefore use ad blocking software to hide advertisements, the users are younger and therefore are better at ignoring advertising messages, and that on MySpace, users spend more time browsing through content while on Facebook, users spend their time communicating with friends and therefore have their attention diverted away from advertisements.[59]

Revenues
(estimated, in millions US$) Year Revenue Growth
2006 $&000000000000005200000052[60] —
2007 $&0000000000000150000000150[61] 188%
2008 $&0000000000000280000000280[62] 87%
2009 $&0000000000000800000000800[3] 186%
2010[N 3] $&00000000000011000000001,100[63] 38%

On pages for brands and products, however, some companies have reported CTR as high as 6.49% for Wall posts.[64] Involver, a social marketing platform, announced in July 2008 that it managed to attain a CTR of 0.7% on Facebook (over 10 times the typical CTR for Facebook ad campaigns) for its first client, Serena Software, managing to convert 1.1 million views into 8,000 visitors to their website.[65] A study found that for video advertisements on Facebook, over 40% of users who viewed the videos viewed the entire video, while the industry average was 25% for in-banner video ads.[66]

Facebook has over 1,700 employees, and offices in 12 countries.[67] Regarding Facebook ownership, Mark Zuckerberg owns 24% of the company, Accel Partners owns 10%, Digital Sky Technologies owns 10%[68], Dustin Moskovitz owns 6%, Eduardo Saverin owns 5%, Sean Parker owns 4%, Peter Thiel owns 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners own between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft owns 1.3%, Li Ka-shing owns 0.75%, the Interpublic Group owns less than 0.5%, a small group of current and former employees and celebrities own less than 1% each, including Matt Cohler, Jeff Rothschild, California U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, Chris Hughes, and Owen Van Natta, while Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus have sizable holdings of the company, and the remaining 30% or so are owned by employees, an undisclosed number of celebrities, and outside investors.[69] Adam D'Angelo, chief technology officer and friend of Zuckerberg, resigned in May 2008. Reports claimed that he and Zuckerberg began quarreling, and that he was no longer interested in partial ownership of the company.[70]

WebsiteMain articles: Facebook features and Facebook Platform

Facebook's homepage features a login form on the top right for existing users, and a registration form directly underneath for new visitors.Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (formerly called "fan pages", until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.[71]

To allay concerns about privacy, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile.[72] The website is free to users, and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads.[73] Facebook requires a user’s name and profile picture (if applicable) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings.[74]


Optional profile shown on Facebook in 2011. Made available in December 2010.The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization.[75] Another difference is Facebook’s requirement that users utilize their true identity, a demand that MySpace does not make.[76] MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.[77] Facebook has a number of features with which users may interact. They include the Wall, a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see;[78] Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification then tells a user that they have been poked);[79] Photos, where users can upload albums and photos;[80] and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions.[81] Depending on privacy settings, anyone who can see a user's profile can also view that user's Wall. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.[78]


Facebook mobile graphical user interfaceOver time, Facebook added features to its website. On September 6, 2006, a News Feed was announced, which appears on every user's homepage and highlights information including profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays of the user's friends.[82] This enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause.[83] Initially, the News Feed caused dissatisfaction among Facebook users; some complained it was too cluttered and full of undesired information, while others were concerned it made it too easy for others to track individual activities (such as relationship status changes, events, and conversations with other users).[84]

In response, Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. Since then, users have been able to control what types of information are shared automatically with friends. Users are now able to prevent user-set categories of friends from seeing updates about certain types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.[85]

On February 23, 2010, Facebook was granted US patent 7669123 on certain aspects of its News Feed. The patent covers News Feeds in which links are provided so that one user can participate in the same activity of another user.[86] The patent may encourage Facebook to pursue action against websites that violate its patent, which may potentially include websites such as Twitter.[87]

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos.[88] Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. As of May 2009, this limit has been increased to 200 photos per album.[89][90][91][92]

Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user's friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to "tag", or label users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.[93]


Profile shown on Thefacebook in 2005
Facebook profile shown in 2007Facebook Notes was introduced on August 22, 2006, a blogging feature that allowed tags and embeddable images. Users were later able to import blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services.[34] During the week of April 7, 2008, Facebook released a Comet-based[94] instant messaging application called "Chat" to several networks,[95] which allows users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-based instant messengers.

Facebook launched Gifts on February 8, 2007, which allows users to send virtual gifts to their friends that appear on the recipient's profile. Gifts cost $1.00 each to purchase, and a personalized message can be attached to each gift.[96][97] On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads.[98] Marketplace has been compared to Craigslist by CNET, which points out that the major difference between the two is that listings posted by a user on Marketplace are only seen by users that are in the same network as that user, whereas listings posted on Craigslist can be seen by anyone.[99]

On July 20, 2008, Facebook introduced "Facebook Beta", a significant redesign of its user interface on selected networks. The Mini-Feed and Wall were consolidated, profiles were separated into tabbed sections, and an effort was made to create a "cleaner" look.[100] After initially giving users a choice to switch, Facebook began migrating all users to the new version beginning in September 2008.[101] On December 11, 2008, it was announced that Facebook was testing a simpler signup process.[102]

On June 13, 2009, Facebook introduced a "Usernames" feature, whereby pages can be linked with simpler URLs such as http://www.facebook.com/facebook as opposed to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20531316728.[103] Many new smartphones offer access to the Facebook services either through their web-browsers or applications. An official Facebook application is available for the iPhone OS, the Android OS, and the WebOS. Nokia and Research In Motion both provide Facebook applications for their own mobile devices. More than 150 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices across 200 mobile operators in 60 countries.

On November 15, 2010, Facebook announced a new "Facebook Messages" service. In a media event that day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, "It's true that people will be able to have an @facebook.com email addresses, but it's not email." The launch of such a feature had been anticipated for some time before the announcement, with some calling it a "Gmail killer." The system, to be available to all of the website's users, combines text messaging, instant messaging, emails, and regular messages, and will include privacy settings similar to those of other Facebook services. Codenamed "Project Titan," Facebook Messages took 15 months to develop.[104][105]

ReceptionSee also: Criticism of Facebook
According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008.[106] ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 130 million unique visitors in May 2010, an increase of 8.6 million people.[107] According to Alexa, the website's ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 2nd.[108] Quantcast ranks the website 2nd in the U.S. in traffic,[109] and Compete.com ranks it 2nd in the U.S.[110] The website is the most popular for uploading photos, with 50 billion uploaded cumulatively.[111] In 2010, Sophos's "Security Threat Report 2010" polled over 500 firms, 60% of which responded that they believed that Facebook was the social network that posed the biggest threat to security, well ahead of MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn.[54]

Facebook is the most popular social networking site in several English-speaking countries, including Canada,[112] the United Kingdom,[113] and the United States.[114][115][116][117] In regional Internet markets, Facebook penetration is highest in North America (69 percent), followed by Middle East-Africa (67 percent), Latin America (58 percent), Europe (57 percent), and Asia-Pacific (17 percent).[118]

The website has won awards such as placement into the "Top 100 Classic Websites" by PC Magazine in 2007,[119] and winning the "People's Voice Award" from the Webby Awards in 2008.[120] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named the second most popular thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and only ranked lower than the iPod.[121]

On March 2010, Judge Richard Seeborg issued an order approving the class settlement in Lane v. Facebook, Inc., the class action lawsuit arising out of Facebook's Beacon program.

In 2010, Facebook won the Crunchie “Best Overall Startup Or Product” the third year in a row[122] and was recognized as one of the "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies" by Lead411.[123] However, in a July 2010 survey performed by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook received a score of 64 out of 100, placing it in the bottom 5% of all private sector companies in terms of customer satisfaction, alongside industries such as the IRS e-file system, airlines, and cable companies. Reasons for why Facebook scored so poorly include privacy problems, frequent changes to the website's interface, the results returned by the News Feed, and spam.[124]

In December 2008, the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory ruled that Facebook is a valid protocol to serve court notices to defendants. It is believed to be the world's first legal judgement that defines a summons posted on Facebook as legally binding.[125] In March 2009, the New Zealand High Court associate justice David Glendall allowed for the serving of legal papers on Craig Axe by the company Axe Market Garden via Facebook.[126] Employers (such as Virgin Atlantic Airways) have also used Facebook as a means to keep tabs on their employees and have even been known to fire them over posts they have made.[127]

By 2005, the use of Facebook had already become so ubiquitous that the generic verb "facebooking" had come into use to describe the process of browsing others' profiles or updating one's own.[128] In 2008, Collins English Dictionary declared "Facebook" as their new Word of the Year.[129] In December 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary declared their word of the year to be the verb "unfriend", defined as "To remove someone as a "friend" on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight” ".[130]

As of April 2010, according to The New York Times, countries with most Facebook users are the United States, the United Kingdom and Indonesia.[131] Indonesia has become the country with the second largest number of Facebook users, after the United States, with 24 million users, or 10% of Indonesia's population.[132] Also in early 2010, Openbook was established, an avowed parody website (and privacy advocacy website)[133] that enables text-based searches of those Wall posts that are available to "Everyone", i.e. to everyone on the Internet.

Writers for The Wall Street Journal found in 2010 that Facebook apps were transmitting identifying information to "dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies". The apps used an HTTP referrer which exposed the user's identity and sometimes their friends'. Facebook said, "We have taken immediate action to disable all applications that violate our terms".[134]

Political impact
The stage at the Facebook – Saint Anselm College debates in 2008.Facebook's role in the American political process was demonstrated in January 2008, shortly before the New Hampshire primary, when Facebook teamed up with ABC and Saint Anselm College to allow users to give live feedback about the "back to back" January 5 Republican and Democratic debates.[135][136][137] Charles Gibson moderated both debates, held at the Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College. Facebook users took part in debate groups organized around specific topics, register to vote, and message questions.[138]

Over 1,000,000 people installed the Facebook application 'US politics' in order to take part, and the application measured users' responses to specific comments made by the debating candidates.[139] This debate showed the broader community what many young students had already experienced: Facebook was an extremely popular and powerful new way to interact and voice opinions. An article written by Michelle Sullivan of Uwire.com illustrates how the "facebook effect" has affected youth voting rates, support by youth of political candidates, and general involvement by the youth population in the 2008 election.[140]

In February 2008, a Facebook group called "One Million Voices Against FARC" organized an event that saw hundreds of thousands of Colombians march in protest against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as the FARC (from the group's Spanish name).[141] In August 2010, one of North Korea's official government websites, Uriminzokkiri, joined Facebook.[142]

In 2010 in English the site was linked to and attributed to a rise in Syphilis cases based on research but this was rebuked by the company as deliberate misrepresentation of the concepts of correlation and causality.[143]

In media Wikinews has news involving Facebook:
Bloggers investigate social networking websites
News services and World Wide Web companies increase Persian language services after Iranian presidential election


At age 102, Ivy Bean of Bradford, England joined Facebook in 2008, making her one of the oldest people ever on Facebook. An inspiration to other residents of the care home in which she lived,[144] she quickly became more widely known and several fan pages were made in her honor. She visited Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, in Downing Street early in 2010.[145] Some time after creating her Facebook page, Bean also joined Twitter, when she passed the maximum number of friends allowed by Facebook. She became the oldest person to ever use the Twitter website. At the time of her death in July 2010, she had 4,962 friends on Facebook and more than 56,000 followers on Twitter. Her death was widely reported in the media and she received tributes from several notable media personalities.[146]
"FriendFace", a December 2008 episode of the British sitcom, The IT Crowd, parodied Facebook and social networking sites, in general.[147]
American author, Ben Mezrich, published a book in July 2009 about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, titled The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.[148]
In response to the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day controversy and the ban of the website in Pakistan, an Islamic version of the website was created, called MillatFacebook.[149]
"You Have 0 Friends", an April 2010 episode of the American animated comedy series, South Park, parodied Facebook.[150]
The Social Network, a drama film directed by David Fincher about the founding of Facebook, was released October 1, 2010.[151] The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, and Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. The film was written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book. The film was distributed by Columbia Pictures. No staff members of Facebook, including Zuckerberg, were involved with the project. However, one of Facebook's co-founders, Eduardo Saverin, was a consultant for Mezrich's book. Mark Zuckerberg has said that The Social Network is inaccurate.[152]
See also San Francisco Bay Area portal
Companies portal
Internet portal
Criticism of Facebook
List of social networking websites
Social media
Facebook stalking



Notes1.^ a b c An "active user" is defined by Facebook as a user who has visited the website in the last 30 days.
2.^ "Monthly growth" is the average percentage growth rate at which the total number of active users grows each month over the specified period.
3.^ Projected revenue for 2010
References1.^ a b Eldon, Eric. (2008-12-18). "2008 Growth Puts Facebook In Better Position to Make Money". VentureBeat. http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/18/2008-growth-puts-facebook-in-better-position-to-make-money/. Retrieved 2008-12-19.
2.^ "Niet compatibele browser | Facebook". Blog.facebook.com. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=360924937130. Retrieved 2010-11-07.
3.^ a b "Facebook '09 revenue neared $800 mn". The Economic Times. 2010-06-18. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/Facebook-09-revenue-neared-800-mn-Sources/articleshow/6063819.cms. Retrieved 18 Jun 2010.
4.^ "Press Info", Facebook. Retrieved May 27, 2010.
5.^ "CNNnewslink". Hitwise. Hitwise. http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/facebook-was-the-top-search-term-in-2010-for-sec/. Retrieved 3 January 2011.
6.^ a b c Zuckerberg, Mark (2010-07-21). "500 Million Stories". Facebook. http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=409753352130. Retrieved 2010-07-21.
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