Understanding Facebook : What is Facebook?, How Facebook Started and Other Important Facebook Facts.

The History of Facebook

What is Facebook?

The name comes from the colloquial name of books given at the start of an academic year by university administrators to help students get to know more about each other. Facebook is a social networking website operated and owned by Facebook Inc. Facebook users can add their friends, they can also get in touch with some old friends if the people they are searching for are registered on Facebook. Users can also send messages to their friends and also update their personal profiles instantly to let their friends and family know what are they doing in their life. They can also join networks organized by schools, workplaces, cities and regions. Facebook was ranked as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users in January 2009 by compete.com followed by MySpace. Facebook has a lot of features and also supports a lot of third party applications. Currently Facebook has more than 250 million active users throughout the world.

How It Started?

The brains behind Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. He started Facebook with Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes who were his college roommates and fellow computer science students when studying at Harvard.

The Facebook Saga started on an October 28th night in the year 2003, when Zuckerberg was bogging about a girl who had dumped him and he was trying to get her off his mind. It really seems true that, behind every successful man there is a successful woman. (not so successful woman in this case). In the start it was more like a Harvard University version of Hot or Not called Facemash. After going through a few things Mark launched The Facebook on 4th February 2004, which originally was located at thefacebook.com. Initially, Facebook was just for Harvard students, later it allowed access to other colleges in the Boston area and later it became a network of students from all universities. Then came the High School version in September 2005, then it became available to employees of various big companies and finally on the 26th of September 2006, it was open to everyone who was 13 and above with a valid email id. The company had purchased it’s current domain name, facebook.com in 2005 at $200,000.

Recently, in August 2009 Facebook lite came in to picture to optimize and speed up the use of Facebook, with fewer services and no their party applications.

Other Important Facebook Facts.

Privacy is a very important issue with any social networking websites, and Facebook has compromised it many times. Facebook is also facing several lawsuits from Mark’s former classmates who claim that, Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property. Due to a few controversies Facebook is blocked in several countries including, Iran, China and Syria, but a few months ago Facebook was unblocked in Iran.

Facebook for iPhone: Facebook for iPhone 3.0 : I can't predict an exact date when I will submit to Apple, but I can say that I am about 98% done -Joe

Facebook for iPhone: Facebook for iPhone 3.0

Facebook for iPhone 3.0 is coming very soon. I can't predict an exact date when I will submit to Apple, but I can say that I am about 98% done. So what's new in this update?

1. The "new" News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

The one feature everyone is asking for, Push Notifications, is in development but it won't make it into 3.0. You can expect it in a 3.1 update later this summer.

When I have submitted the app to Apple I will let you all know!

- Joe

Facebook page can be a very effective means for merchants to communicate with their audience on a unique and personal level

With more than 250 million active users, Facebook is the largest and most popular social network right now, making it a very valuable marketing tool. When used properly, a Facebook page can be a very effective means for merchants to communicate with their audience on a unique and personal level.

A Facebook page is a public profile that enables you to share your business, brand and products with other Facebook users. Creating a page for your business enables your fans and their friends to absorb and interact with your brand, while providing you with a unique opportunity to engage with your audience—a win-win scenario.

But when making your foray into Facebook, you'll want to follow these best practices to reap the most rewards for your business:

Learn about Facebook. The perception is that Facebook users are college students. But the fact is nearly two-thirds of all active Facebook users are not in college. Facebook’s audience is slightly female with the fastest growing demographic being users 35 years of age and older.

Develop a plan. Before you create a page for your business, you’ll want to be sure that you have a solid plan and strategy in place. What does your business want to convey to its audience through its page? How are you going to go about doing this? Remember, these unique pages are designed to represent your business and are separate from user profiles.

Once you have a plan in place, you can start creating your page by logging into your personal Facebook account and going to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. Then fill out the required information and hit the blue “Create Page” button at the bottom of the page.

Customize your page. There are several ways to customize your page on Facebook. Much like user profiles, pages have multiple tabs. Default tabs include the Wall tab, which is for exchanging information with your fans and the Info tab, which is for sharing content.

Aside from these, your business can also create customized tabs. Some examples of customized tabs you may want to include are photos, reviews or events.

Forming discussions and groups provide other ways to customize your Facebook page. For example, a food merchant may want to start a group devoted to donut junkies and begin a discussion about people’s different pastry preferences. The possibilities are countless.

Gather fans. Now that your business has established a Facebook page, it’s time to promote it. Include a link to your company's Facebook page on your homepage, in e-mail signatures or in your monthly newsletter if your business has one.

And don’t hesitate to ask your business friends and acquaintances to "fan" you on Facebook – the more credible fans your business has, the better.

Say "cheese." Another good way to gain exposure for your business is to start posting pictures to your page. Then tag all of the individuals within the pictures—being sure to spell names correctly. Doing this will ensure that the people tagged – assuming they’re a Facebook user – will get a notice with the link back to your business page and it will be included in their news feed for all of their friends to see.

Posting pictures is a great way to spread the word. But note that it’s always good to ask your friends if you can tag them before actually doing it.

Don't share too much. Remember that everything you post on Facebook, including wall updates, photos and videos, becomes public media. It’s therefore important to err on the side of caution when deciding what to share. Anything of a confidential, hurtful or offensive nature should be avoided.

Keep your page fresh and engaging. As with any social media site, it’s important to be proactive. Be sure to update posts at least once a week to include relevant, interesting information that will keep your audience engaged and active.

Company that allow users to access Facebook in the workplace lose an average 1 to 1.5% in total worker productivity

Facebook lovers, here is another survey showing how employee productivity is robbed at workplaces. So put a limit on its usage before employers and the bosses put a stop on its usage at work.

While it won't make employers popular, restricting Facebook can reclaim lost productivity.

A new study by Boston IT advisory firm, Nucleus Research finds that, company that allow users to access Facebook in the workplace lose an average 1.5% in total worker productivity.

Nearly half of employees in the recent 'social net-working' study use Facebook during work hours some as much as two hours per day.

The average worker uses it for 15 minutes a day, and most couldn't come up with a legitimate "business reason" for logging on.

The survey of 237 employees also showed that 77% of workers who have a Facebook account use it during work hours.

And "some" employees use the social networking site as much as two hours a day at work, the study found.

Nucleus Research did not say how many workers fit into that category, but did note that one in 33 workers surveyed only used Facebook at work.

Facebook's multi-lingual, 64 languages and locales availability is what makes it so popular

Around 70 percent of Facebook’s 250 million monthly active users are outside of the US, and most of them aren’t speaking English.

The site has been seeing massive growth around the world, partly the result of Facebook letting users translate the site into their own languages over the past couple of years.

Now, the company is aiming to capitalize on its international growth by providing translated versions of its web-wide identity service, Facebook Connect.

Here’s what that means for users, from the Facebook developer blog today:

When a user first connects to your site, or publishes something back to Facebook, the Facebook Connect content will appear in the language you specify.

Facebook's multi-lingual, 64 languages and locales availability is what makes it so popular

User-generated content continues to appear in the language in which it was written.

Facebook is already available in 64 languages and dialects; Facebook Connect is already live on 15,000 applications, sites and devices.

Connect translations will probably get a lot more people using Facebook to sign in and share information on web sites everywhere.

Combined with Facebook’s move to allow advertising and virtual currency purchases in more real-money currencies, translating Connect could lead to more revenue for the company.

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Facebook Killed the Private Life

Facebook is now in Indian Laguages - Desi Facebook

The world’s trendiest social networking site went desi on Friday. Facebook has introduced new features that can help members navigate in Hindi, Tamil and other regional Indian languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Malayalam and Telugu.

Users can change language settings through the ‘settings’ tab or through the language option on their Facebook homepage.

In the increasingly multilingual Web, one can already cut and paste Tamil and Hindi scripts. The latest move helps instructions for browsing in Indian languages, but Facebook is not yet enabled for transliteration, which enables instant conversion of the English script turning into phonetic-based texts in other languages.

Facebook users can only browse through the site in the five regional languages and not message each other or update their status yet. Rival Google’s social networking site Orkut has Indian language transliteration in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.

Facebook is the second most popular networking site in India after Orkut, according to market research firm comScore.

Orkut recorded 12.8 million visitors of the total 19.3 million on social networking sites in India at the end of 2008 — three times that of Facebook, which recorded 4 million visitors.

Facebook Tips & Tricks TOP 10

1. Be careful with whom you connect - so you can keep the network personal. When someone I don’t know asks to connect with me, I always email him/her and ask how do we know each other, and why should we connect. If I don’t get an answer, I ignore the request. This way I can feel comfortable with writing a status message such as “Kfir is having a bad day” without feeling, well, bad.

2. Create groups in areas that are not saturated, and you can add value to the community - when I signed up for Facebook, I felt that there is a need for a Vloggers group. So I’ve opened one, and reviewed it periodically. I’ve met a lot of interesting people through this group, BUT

3. Don’t nag people in the group too much - this is Facebook, not Ning. Learn from Chris Brogan’s Grasshoppers experience.

4. Choose the applications you use carefully - don’t Myspace your Facebook profile. I check all the applications I find, but I am very careful with the ones I keep on my profile.

5. Invite your friends only to useful or fun applications - and no, Zombie is not one of them

6. Constantly review the groups you are member of, and engage in the discussions there. Nothing new here - this is a social network, so, be social.

7. Try to be a member of up to 30 groups - so people can see what are your topics of interest.

8. Initiate discussion threads between your friends - but don’t spam them. This is a great way to create a conversation with your friends not only you are talking with people you like, you are also helping them to connect amongst themselves. Did we mention that this is a social network?

9. Make your profile interesting to read - I invested a lot of time in creating a profile that not only provides information but make people read it through. Applications like iRead, friends wheel, flixster, and wordpress plugin (if you have a blog) bring my profile to life.

10. The most important tip of all - use it as a part of your social media toolbox - mesh it up with your blog, create events that are relevant to your day to day live, share your posts and video material and so on. it is like a snowball effect - one effort feeds the other and increase the impact of your online and offline social activities.

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