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Facebook is currently the world’s largest social networking site boasting a community of over a billion members from all around the world. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg and his Harvard classmates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Facebook was only originally intended to be a social networking site for Harvard students but was quickly expanded to include other elite universities. In 2006, Facebook was opened to the general public.

History

Between 2006 and 2009, Facebook experienced enormous growth. It surpassed MySpace as America’s most popular social networking site in 2008 and became America’s second most visited website in 2009 (after Google). In 2011, Facebook partnered with Skype to introduce one to one video calling. In April 2012, Facebook purchased Instagram for a billion dollars. With twenty seven million members at the time of its purchase, Instagram was quickly integrated into Facebook while still remaining a own stand-alone app. In May of 2012, Facebook went public, opening at thirty-eight dollars a share making it worth a hundred and four billion dollars: the largest initial valuation ever. However, Facebook’s IPO is generally considered a failure because it lost almost twenty five percent of it’s value within a month of its initial offering. Irregardless of Facebook’s shortcomings and polarizing position in popular discourse, it’s an extremely popular service that allows people to stay connected with friends and family, share important information, and advertise goods and services.

Business Model

Facebook primarily generates revenue by selling advertising space on the website. To begin this process, Facebook aggregates the data of its users. Then, it determines what groups are most likely to click on specific advertisements by drawing assumptions from users age, sex, location, job, etc. By tailoring advertisements to specific interest groups, Facebook attempts to match potential buyers with sellers. That having been said, Facebook has a lower clickthrough rate (CTR) than the industry average. For example, Google has average CTR of 3.16% with its best adds topping out at an astounding 8%. Inversely, Facebook's strongest preforming advertising sector, telecommunications, only had a CTR of 0.96%. Although many theories have attempted to account for this phenomenon, Facebook's low CTR is mostly attributed the successful use of add-blocking software and the fact that the younger generation, Facebook's main user base, is more adept at ignoring advertisements.

Privacy Controversies

Ever since a group of MIT students wrote a program that downloaded 70,000 Facebook profiles of users from four schools (MIT, NYU, University of Oklahoma, and Harvard University), as part of a study on privacy on Facebook in 2005, Facebook's privacy policies have been under constant scrutiny. Although Facebook's business model relies on using its user data to sell appropriate advertisements, concerns have been raised over some of Facebook's more intrusive policies. For example, in 2011, Facebook enabled a facial recognition feature dubbed "Tag Suggestions" which gave users suggestions as to which of their friends were in recently uploaded pictures. Although privacy concerns were brought up over this feature, Facebook defended its new 'Big Brotheresque' piece of tech by pointing out that it can be disabled. Furthermore, through a user's internet cookies, Facebook is able to see and aggregate the users web history for the past 90 days. This means, that if someone accesses a Facebook page, Facebook is then able to see what they do after and for how long. Although this does help Facebook learn more about how to advertise to its users, the method and scope extends far beyond the users initial purpose.

In the summer of 2013, Facebook released a report detailing how much information they share with governments. Overall Facebook received 26,000 separate requests for information on nearly 39,000 different accounts from 72 different countries.. Although Facebook claims that government must meet a "very high legal bar [...] in order to receive any information about any of [their] users,' the jury is still out on how much Facebook actually protects the data of its users.

Analysis

Although Facebook constantly changes its layout, like many other social networking sites, it relies on three key features: “profiles, public testimonials or comments, and publicly articulated, traversable lists of friends.” When you sign up for Facebook, it will generate a profile for you. Profiles are individual pages that represent individual users. On your profile you have to option to list personal information (relationship status, education level), upload photos (Facebook currently has over 50 billion pictures uploaded), and show your connections under your “friends list.” Facebook then allows users to add to their friends profiles by posting comments, links and photos. It should be noted that while individual privacy settings can be adjusted, on Facebook, users must be friends to contribute to each others profiles.

By looking at the seven key concepts that Nancy Baym outlines in her book, “Personal Connections in the Digital Age,” it’s clear why Facebook is so successful. Unlike any other other social networking site that has preceded it, Facebook now has the advantage of size. It’s reach is tremendous as it is now the largest social networking site in North American, South America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. With 1.15 billion people registered on Facebook, almost a sixth of world’s population now has a Facebook profile. Furthermore, with the mobile app, Facebook can be accessed from almost anywhere on any capable device. In 2013, it was reported that 874 million people accessed Facebook through the mobile application. Facebook’s size and influence on popular culture are so huge that some people are joining simply so that they don’t miss out on experiences. More and more, events are being planned, conversations are being had, and information is being shared, exclusively on Facebook.

Besides Facebook’s gravitation pull, it has extremely rich textual cues. Whether users want to communicate through text, photos, video, video calling, or event the ‘like button’, Facebook gives users the ability to convey meaning and build community in hundreds of different ways. Furthermore, because of it’s structure, Facebook allows for both synchronous and asynchronous communication. With video calling, messages, and an automatically updating newsfeed, you can communicate with your friends in real time as well as leave your notifications and messages for another time. Moreover, because Facebook’s structure allows users to view posts, photos, and conversations from any time, it’s accessibly can be a double edged sword. The downside is that Facebook’s searchability and permanence can be extremely damaging later on. For children that grew up with Facebook, anything they posted when they were younger will always exist and be accessible. Even when a Facebook profile is deactivated, the information that was previously on it can still be found. When users choose to reactivate a profile if it was deactivated, nothing is lost. Pictures, videos, posts and other footprints are recovered and is in place just the way it was before.

Another key feature of Facebook is the ability it gives its users to share and replicate and information. Whether that’s sharing links, pictures, or videos, Facebook gives it’s users the ability to take information and then share it to a potentially massive audience. With precise digital copying techniques, in many cases, it's become impossible for users to differentiate the copy and the original. These features are precisely what allow campaigns such as the infamous “Kony 2012” to go so viral so quickly. Additionally, with Facebook's recent incorporation of the 'hashtag', it's becoming easier to share information to a large group of people. While your posts used to only be accessible to the people on your friends list, users that aren't on your friends list can now see your posts by searching for your hashtag. The recent addition of the hashtag represents the website's effort to connect users with a broader community of people who share their interests, thoughts, and ideas. While publics used to form around community pages and groups, the addition of the hashtags allow users to partake in a more dynamic, fluid communities.

Although Facebook does have some apparent security issues, its reach, replicability, mobility, temporal structure, storage, and ability to deliver social cues have placed it at the top of the social networking hierarchy where it’s likely to stay.