[edit] Brief Description

[edit] Wiki description

Description

With more than 40 million users and 200 000 new users every day, Facebook is the largest social network on the web
Facebook was founded in 2004 and in its first two years only university students had access to it. Since last year anyone can have a Facebook account and since May this year anyone can have its own build in application inside the website

Company

Founded by Mark Zuckerberg , a 23 year old Harvard student, Facebook was intended to be the online version of the university reference book with all the students’ pictures and names. It quickly expanded to other universities and anyone with a valid email address could have created an account. By 2006, Facebook is free to use by everyone
The term “facebook” stands for a publication with students photographs and names that is distributed at the beginning of the year in U.S. colleges or preparatory schools to freshman and staff as a way to let them know each other better

Numbers

• 7^th most visited web site
• More than 40 million users
• $30 million revenues per month
• 8,5 million photos uploaded daily
• On average, 19 minutes are spent daily on the website by a Facebook user
• 200 000 new users sign up daily
• 2 TB – RAM in memcache servers
• 10 Billion , the evaluation that Microsoft did recently for the purpose of buying 10% of the company

Features

The user profile page has some build in functionalities:

My pictures

Besides profile user pictures that are displayed in the profile page , search results, wall posts or photo comments, users can also create their own private or public albums. They can upload an unlimited number of photos and they can “tag” in the pictures the people they have listed as their friends on Facebook. Tagging a photo means that they identify the people in the image. If the people are their Facebook friends, the tags will serve as links to their profiles. The photos will also be added to the "More Photos of Me" section of their profiles

The Wall

A place on user profile where Facebook friends can post short messages, notes or attachments. Everything posted on the wall is visible to everyone visiting the profile page

Gifts

Facebook users can send each other virtual gifts for the price of one dollar. The gift shop contains a couple of hundreds of cool icons from which the users can choose from. They can attach small messages to their gifts and send them as private , public or anonymous. If the present is public then the small icons appears on the recipient wall with the givers message
Even though some of the presents are free to give, users have to pay $1.00 for hearts, bears, chocolates, jewelry, drinks and some other inventive gifts. With the growth of applications that let Facebook users to send free gifts, this feature becomes less and less popular

Pokes

Friends can attract the attention of the other by sending “pokes”. People interpret poking in different ways but Facebook encourages its users to come up with their own meaning of this interactive action

Friend Finder

Facebook allows users to import their email contacts (Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Gmail or other), as well as search for contacts via their web email address and AIM Instant Messenger

Status

Status is a way to keep friends up to date on what the user is doing, thinking, or feeling at any given time. This feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions

Events

Facebook events are a great resource to let friends know about interesting things coming up in their community and to organize social gatherings. The Events page contains all of the important information about Facebook events. From the Events page users can create a new event, check out relevant upcoming events for them and thier friends, and view past events

Marketplace

Marketplace is Facebook's self-service solution for listing items that users put for sale, or housing for rent, jobs available, and so on. Users can use Marketplace to find things they want to buy or use, as well as list anything that they are in the market for purchasing, renting, etc

Applications

In May 2007,at San Francisco Design Center was launched the Facebook Platform for developers, which provides a framework to create applications that interact with these core Facebook features
With this evolution of Facebook Platform anyone can now build the next generation of applications with deep integration into Facebook, mass distribution through the social graph, and a new business opportunity. Developers can now build applications that have the same access to integration into the social graph as Facebook applications, such as photos, notes, and events. Over ten integration points are available, including:

• Canvas
• Profile Box
• Profile Action
• News Feed
• Mini-Feed
• Left Navigation
• Requests
• Notifications
• Emails
• Messages
• Share
• Development

The Facebook Platform is a standards-based web service with methods for accessing and contributing Facebook data

Facebook Developers Wiki

A deep resource for anyone developing on the Facebook Platform, this wiki is a reference for developers interested in the Facebook Platform. Users can find here getting started guides, answers to frequently asked or random questions, common error messages, bugs and omissions, code examples and much more

Interface (API)

The Facebook API uses a REST-based interface. This means that Facebook method calls are made over the internet by sending HTTP GET or POST requests to our REST server. With the API, users can add social context to thier application by utilizing profile, friend, photo, and event data. Information about API methods, data store API and other additional helpful things can be found on the API wiki

Query (FQL)

Facebook Query Language, or FQL, allows users to use a SQL-style interface to more easily query the same data that they can access through other Facebook API methods
The key advantages of using FQL over more traditional API methods are:

• Condensed XML reduces bandwidth and parsing costs
• More complex requests can reduce the number of requests necessary
• Provides a single consistent, unified interface for all of your data
• It's fun and developers can start experimenting that with some examples

Markup (FBML)

Facebook Markup enables users to build full Facebook Platform applications that deeply integrate into a user's Facebook experience. Developers can hook into several Facebook integration points, including the Profile, Profile Actions, Canvas, News Feed and Mini-Feed

Tools

API Test Console and FBML Test Console are tools where users can experiment with functions and responses, and see what content Facebook Platform makes available

Resources

On the “Get to know” platform, developers can find everything they need to have to start their application : the anatomy of a Facebook application, the guide for creating it, client library downloads (PHP and JAVA), and some Microsoft developer tools

Top Applications

There are 4501 applications developed on Facebook ( as of September 26, 2007 ) and the top 5 with most active users are:

• Top Friends –users can display in their profile only their most loved friends
• Fun Wall – replacing the original wall, users can post more items on the fun wall such as pictures and videos
• SuperPoke! – more actions to get friends attention, now Facebook users can do more than just poke
• Video – application developed by Facebook, Video lets users play with videos in their profile : they can record themselves directly from the web cam, send videos from their mobile or even send video messages to their friends
• Super Wall – it’s similar to FunWall, users can add tones of stuff to their friends wall as opposed to the “boring”, “old” wall

Upcoming

UK traffic grew (blue line) a lot last month so Facebook now opens an office in London , the second one after the Palo Alto, CA See Also:

• Social networking comparison Compare Social Network Features on ITerating
• Facebook Applications List with important Facebook Applications and Reviews

Related websites

• Facebook
• Facebook Blog Official Company Blog
• Facebook Platform
• Facebook Application