February 4: On This Day in World History …. briefly
In May 2018, the government of Papua New Guinea announced that it would ban Facebook for a month while it considered the impact of the website on the country.
2004: Mainstream online social networking site ‘facebook’ is founded
Facebook, Inc. the American online social media and social networking service company, is based in Menlo Park, California and was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is considered one of the ‘Big Four’ (actually five) technology companies with Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft.
The company name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students.
Facebook can be accessed from devices with internet connectivity – personal computers, tablets and smartphones. After registering, users can create a customised profile revealing information about themselves. They can post text, photos and multimedia of their own devising and share it with other users as ‘friends’. Users can use various embedded apps and receive notifications of friends’ activities and may start and join common-interest groups. Zuckerberg built a website called ‘Facemash’ in 2003 while attending Harvard University. The site was comparable to Hot or Not and used ‘photos compiled from online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person’.
Facemash attracted 450 visitors and 22 000 photo-views in its first four hours! The site was sent to several campus group list-servers, but was shut down a few days later by Harvard administration. Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy, but in the end charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final exam, uploading all art images to a website accompanied by a comments section and then sharing the site with his classmates.
Facebook had more than 2.2 billion monthly active users in January 2018. It receives prominent media coverage, including controversies such as user privacy and psychological effects. The company has faced intense pressure over censorship and content that some users find objectionable. Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012 was the largest initial valuation to-date for a public company ($104 billion). Facebook offers other products and services and acquired Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Rift, as well as the independently-developed Facebook Messenger.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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