Facebook is a social networking website that allows people to communicate with their friends and exchange information. Launched on February 4 2004, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006 and former Ardsley High School student. Initially the membership was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Northeastern University, Tufts University), Rochester, Stanford, NYU, Northwestern, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools and some large companies. Since September 11 2006, it has been made available to any email address[2] user who inputs a certain age range. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.


As of July 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 34 million active members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).[3] From September 2006 to September 2007[4] it increased its ranking from 60th to 7th most visited web site, and was the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily.[5][6]


The name of the site refers to the depicting members of the campus community that U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.


Origins and expansion

The advent of Facebook came about as a spin-off of a Harvard University version of Hot or Not called Facemash.[11] Mark Zuckerberg, while attending Harvard as a sophomore, concocted Facemash on October 28, 2003. Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind.

According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "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." To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the house's private dormitory ID images. "Perhaps Harvard will squelch it for legal reasons without realizing its value as a venture that could possibly be expanded to other schools (maybe even ones with good-looking people ... )," Zuckerberg wrote in his personal blog. "But one thing is certain, and it’s that I’m a jerk for making this site. Oh well. Someone had to do it eventually ... "[13] 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, but ultimately the charges were dropped.[14]

Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in February 2004, while attending Harvard University, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. At that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded to MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This expansion continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools.

The following semester, Zuckerman founded "The Facebook", originally located at thefacebook.com, on February 4, 2004.[15] “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg told The Harvard Crimson. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”[16] 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.[17] 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.[18] This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League and Boston area schools, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States.[19] In June 2004, Zuckerberg, McCollum and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California, to continue work on Facebook's development with additional help from Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker.

2005
In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners. On August 23 2005, Facebook bought the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface Corporation for $200,000 and dropped "the" from its name. At that time the site was overhauled, a change intended to make profile pages more user-friendly, according to Zuckerberg.

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[21] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft.[23] Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.[24][25] In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. On December 11 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to more than 2,000 colleges and more than 25,000 high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.

In September, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners of the social networking website ConnectU, filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally used source code intended for a website they asked him to build for them.[10][11] Also at that time, Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December, Facebook's user base had exceeded one million.


2006
On February 27 2006, Facebook began allowing college students to add high school students as friends due to requests from users. About a month later, on March 28 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a potential acquisition of the site was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million, and it was rumored that the asking price was as high as $2 billion. In April, Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners invested an additional $25 million in the site. In May, Facebook's network extended into India, at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The following month Facebook threatened to seek costs of up to $100,000 from Quizsender.com for copyright infringement for allegedly copying the "look and feel" of Facebook. On July 25, new services were offered in the site that would potentially produce additional revenue. A promotion was arranged between Facebook and iTunes, in which members of the Apple Students group would receive a free 25 song sampler each week until September 30 in various music genres. The promotion's purpose was to make students more familiar with and enthusiastic about each service as fall classes approached. In the early half of August, Facebook added universities in Germany and high schools in Israel, (Haifa, Jerusalem, and Qiryat Gat) to its network. On the 22nd of that month, Facebook introduced Facebook Notes, a blogging feature with tagging, embedded images, and other features, also allowing the importation of blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. This newly added feature also included the common blog feature of allowing readers to comment on users' entries. On September 11 2006, Facebook became open to all users of the Internet, prompting protest from its existing user base. Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address.

2007
On May 10 2007, Facebook announced a plan to add free classified advertisements to its website, making it a competitor with established online companies such as Craigslist. This feature, known as Facebook Marketplace, went live on May 14 2007; Facebook launched an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as Facebook Platform. In June, the partnership begun the previous year between iTunes and Facebook continued, with the download service again offering free music samplers through the Apple Students group. In July, Facebook announced its first acquisition, purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. In August, the company was featured in a Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy in the magazine's annual college edition.

Facebook hired YouTube's former CFO Gideon Yu on July 24 2007. Gideon Yu succeeded Michael Sheridan.

On September 25 2007, it was rumored that Microsoft may buy a stake in Facebook. An outright sale of Facebook is said to be unlikely as founder Mark Zuckerberg would like to keep it independent.


Operations
The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week).[7] Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends. According to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students in [previously] supported colleges have a profile [on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60% log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month." According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, "People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook."[8] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited liability company specialising in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and losing only to the iPod.


Site features

The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.

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, In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the wall, whereas previously the wall was limited to textual content only.

Pokes, which allows users to send a virtual "poke" to each other (a notification that tells a user that they have been poked), Photos, where users can upload albums and photos, and Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions. A user's Wall is visible to anyone who is able to see that user's profile, which depends on their privacy settings. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously limited to textual content only.

Pokes
Facebook includes a "poke" feature which allows one user to send a "poke" to another. According to Facebook's FAQ section on the Poke Feature, "a poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook. When we created the poke, we thought it would be cool to have a feature without any specific purpose. People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings." In principle this is intended to serve as a "nudge" to attract the attention of the other user. However while many Facebook users, as intended, use the feature to attract attention or say hello,[30] some users construe it as a sexual advance.This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group titled "Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex," which, as of September 2007, has more than 250,000 members.

Friends often engage in what is known as a "poke war," where the poke is exchanged back and forth continuously between two users by using the "poke back" feature.

There are several new applications such as "X Me" and "SuperPoke!", that allow users to put any action in place of the word "poke."

Over time, Facebook has added several new 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 related to the user's friends. 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 other people to track down individual activities (such as changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users). In response to this dissatisfaction, 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 friends from seeing updates about different types of activities, including profile changes, Wall posts, and newly added friends.

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos. 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. In the past, all users were limited to 60 photos per album. However, some users report that they are able to create albums with a new limit of 200 photos. It remains unclear why some members have a 200-photo limit while others do not. 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 applications 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.

Facebook 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. During the week of April 7, 2008, Facebook released a Comet-basedinstant messaging application called "Chat" to several networks, 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. On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched Marketplace, which lets users post free classified ads. 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.

Status
The "status" feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions. Facebook prompts the status update with "(User name) is..." and Facebook users fill in the rest. Status updates are noted in the "Recently updated" section of a users' friend list. Many students have protested the required "is" referring to people who speak languages other than English and legitimate sentences that cannot be changed to accommodate the "is" grammatically (e.g. "(User name) just got a haircut.").

Events
Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings.

Applications
On May 24 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features.

Among the most popular applications are Top Friends, which allows users to select and display their favorite friends; Graffiti, which gives users a visual version of Facebook's wall; and iLike, a social music discovery service that features concert information and a music trivia game, similar to the one featured on the iPod. Third-party websites such as Adonomics, which provides application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications. Even games such as chess and Scrabble are available.


On August 29 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, in order to give more attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of users was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications.

As of October 11, 2007, there are more than 5,500 applications.

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. After initially giving users a choice to switch, Facebook began migrating all users to the new version beginning September, 2008.

On December 11, 2008, it was announced that Facebook is testing out a new simpler signup process.


Facebook Markup Language
Facebook Markup Language is a subset of HTML. It allows Facebook application writers to customise the "look and feel" of their applications, to a limited extent
.
Facebook Video
During the time that Facebook released its platform, it also released an application of its own for sharing videos on Facebook. Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. Additionally, users can "tag" their friends in videos they add much like the way users can tag their friends in photos. This feature was expected to increase competition with MySpace. However, the Facebook Video Application does not allow sharing videos outside of Facebook. Users will not be able to export or download videos from Facebook. Despite this, a Greasemonkey Userscript was posted on Userscripts.org which allows both the downloading of Facebook Videos and the embedding[37] of Videos on sites outside of Facebook's website.

Sale rumors
In 2006, with the sale of social networking site MySpace to NewsCorp, rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, has said that he does not want to sell the company and denies rumors to the contrary.[39] He has already rejected outright offers in the range of $975 million, and it is not clear who might be willing to pay a higher premium for the site. Steve Rosenbush, a technology business analyst, suspects Viacom.

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place for the acquisition of the social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion. In October, after Google purchased video-sharing site YouTube, rumors circulated that Google had offered $2.3 billion to outbid Yahoo!

Peter Thiel, a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to that of Viacom's MTV brand and based on shared target demographic audience.

In September 2007, Microsoft approached Facebook, proposing an investment in return for a 5% stake in the company. Microsoft would pay an estimated 300 to 500 million dollars for the share. Other companies such as Google have also expressed interest in getting a stake in Facebook.

Use in investigations

Use of social network websites in investigations

The information students provide on Facebook has been used in investigations by colleges, universities, and local police. Facebook's Terms of Use[45] specify that "the website is available for your personal, noncommercial use only", misleading some to believe that college administrators and police may not use the site for conducting investigations. However, there are settings on Facebook that allow a user to make his/her profile private (only people the user approves may see his/her profile).
Alcohol policy violations

There have been incidents where colleges and universities use Facebook to investigate underage drinking and violations of dry campus policies or discover them while investigating other incidents. For example, several Residence Community Advisors at Northern Kentucky University lost their jobs when pictures were discovered of them having casual drinks in a residence hall one night towards the end of semester.[46] Many high schools have also begun to use Facebook to crack down on underage drinking and other illegal activities.

In response to the monitoring, some students have begun to submit "red herring" party listings.[47] In one case at The George Washington University, shown at CakeParty.org,[48] students advertised their party and were raided by campus police. The police found only cake, no alcohol, and later claimed the break up had been triggered by a noise complaint.[49

Other investigations

* There have been several incidents where candidates in student government elections used Facebook for campaigning in a way that was not permitted by their campaign policies.
* At the University of Mississippi, a group of students were brought before the University's Judicial Board in April 2005 and forced to remove a Facebook group that professed their love for a professor in a sexually suggestive manner.[54]
* One Miami University student was arrested after he set a composite sketch of a rape suspect as his profile picture.[55]
* Others have been punished for rushing the football field at Penn State (Many "I rushed the field" groups were created after the Nittany Lion football team defeated Ohio State in October 2005, and State College Police and Pennsylvania State Police used the groups to arrest those who they believed rushed the field in violation of school policy).[56]
* A Duquesne University student was punished for hate speech against homosexuals.[57]
* Four Syracuse University students were reprimanded for harassing an instructor in a Facebook group and were threatened with expulsion, though the final result was academic probation. [58] On the other hand, University of Louisville students who had created a Facebook group to complain about a professor's teaching shortcomings helped lead to the dismissal of their targeted instructor in February 2006, and the students were not punished.[59]
* In February 2007, following the hit-and-run death of freshman Carlee Wines, University of Connecticut campus police used Facebook to link the suspected driver, Anthony P. Alvino of Lindenhurst, N.Y., to the university.[60] By following leads via Facebook, police learned of the connection between Alvino and his girlfriend, Michele A. Hall, a UConn student.[61] Alvino was charged for the hit-and-run, while Hall was charged with helping cover it up and hindering prosecution.
* In April 2007, just days after the Virginia Tech shooting, a student at the SUNY College at Cobleskill was remanded into psychiatric care and suspended from college after posting a photo of himself on his profile with a vaguely threatening message underneath. This story became even more controversial as it grew across the news.[62][63]
* It has been reported that staff at the University of Oxford have been looking at students' Facebook pages in investigating poor behaviour. Staff have been searching through photos in an effort to root out poor conduct from students celebrating their exam results and graduation. The Oxford University Student Union has urged students to restrict access to 'friends only' in an effort to protect privacy. [64]
* In July 2007 the University of Kent issued a strongly worded statement protesting that a group of students had created a hate page about a library employee, which the site quickly withdrew. [65]
* In November 2006, two students were expelled from the University of Texas fraternity Pi Kappa Alpha based on racist images posted on Facebook.[66]

Other uses of profile information
Some employers look at Facebook profiles of prospective employees or interns. Information posted on Facebook is potentially accessible to employers with faculty or alumni accounts.[67]

Information posted on the site is sometimes distributed publicly. Students who are related to politicians or other public figures have had screenshots of their profiles or photo albums taken and shared in an attempt to embarrass their relatives.[68] After profile information was posted on Gawker and Wonkette, two popular weblogs, Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, sent the sites' publishers cease and desist notices.[69] Also, a group calling itself Performing Politics, Inc. publicly displayed the profiles of students at Yale who had made comments about homosexuality in an effort to show evidence of homophobia at the school.[70]

In Wrentham, Massachusetts, State Senator Scott P. Brown (R) was invited to speak at King Philip Regional High School to talk about his position against gay marriage. During the speech, Brown read verbatim several posts attacking him from a Facebook group dedicated to a pro-gay rights history teacher. Often he included both verbatim profanity and the names of the students who wrote them.[71]

Militant members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in Britain have threatened students at Oxford who support the university's proposed South Parks laboratory saying they are legitimate targets for attack. A counter-activist group called Pro-Test has warned students not to support the lab's construction on Facebook as they believe ALF is monitoring the site.[72]

After the death of a teenager under suspicious circumstances in July 2007, the Ottawa Citizen used comments from a facebook memorial group in a slanderous manner to create a dramatic article on the front page city section showing the irresponsibility of the teen and his peers. The Citizen claimed that the teens thought they were supermen and were invincible and that they had no respect for the law. This sparked outrage amongst the users who wrote many letters to the editor of the Citizen, and the Citizen released an unofficial apology on the wall of the group.

According to Facebook's privacy policy, Facebook reserves the right to release the information that users provide (including favorite movies, television shows, books, music, etc.) to organisations.

Facebook was used by reporters in the Hendrick Hudson Senior Prank Bomb case to contact the involved students. The reporters had a facebook profile and left messages encouraging them to talk to the press about the legal case at hand. [73]

Responses
Schools block access
The University of New Mexico in October 2005 blocked access to Facebook from UNM campus computers and networks, citing unsolicited e-mails and a similar site called UNM Facebook.[74] After a UNM user signed into Facebook from off campus, a message from Facebook said, "We are working with the UNM administration to lift the block and have explained that it was instituted based on erroneous information, but they have not yet committed to restore your access." UNM, in a message to students who tried to access the site from the UNM network, wrote, "This site is temporarily unavailable while UNM and the site owners work out procedural issues. The site is in violation of UNM's Acceptable Computer Use Policy for abusing computing resources (e.g., spamming, trademark infringement, etc.). The site forces use of UNM credentials (e.g., NetID or email address) for non-UNM business." However, after Facebook created an encrypted login and displayed a precautionary message not to use university passwords for access, UNM unblocked access the following spring semester.

The Columbus Dispatch reported on June 22 2006, that Kent State University's athletic director had planned to ban the use of Facebook by athletes and gave them until August 1 to delete their accounts.[76] On July 5, 2006, the Daily Kent Stater reported that the director reversed the decision after reviewing the privacy settings of Facebook.
Organizations blocking Facebook
Ontario government employees, MPPs, and cabinet ministers were blocked from access to Facebook on government computers in May 2007.[77] When the employees tried to access Facebook, a warning message "The Internet website that you have requested has been deemed unacceptable for use for government business purposes". This warning also appears when employees try to access YouTube, gambling or pornographic websites.[78]

The New South Wales Department of Education and Training has also blocked all users (students and staff) from accessing Facebook, as have many other government departments in Australia
Facebook memorials
A notable ancillary effect of social networking websites, particularly Facebook, is the ability for participants to mourn publicly for a deceased individual. On Facebook, students often leave messages of sadness, grief, or hope on the individual's page, transforming it into a sort of public book of condolences. This particular phenomenon has been documented at a number of schools. Previously, Facebook had stated that its official policy on the matter was to remove the profile of the deceased one month after he or she has died,[89] preventing the profile from being used for communal mourning, citing privacy concerns. Due to user response, Facebook amended its policy. Its new policy is to place deceased members' profiles in a "memorialization state".

Additional usage of Facebook as a tool of remembrance is expressed in group memberships on the site. Now that groups are community-wide and available among all networks, many users create Facebook groups to remember not only a deceased friend or individual, but also as a source of support in response to an occurence such as 9/11 or the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.
Customization and security
Facebook is often compared to MySpace but one significant difference between the two sites is the level of customization. MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and CSS while Facebook only allows plain text. However, a number of users have tweaked their profiles by using "hacks." On February 24 2006, a pair of users exploited a cross-site scripting (XSS) hole on the profile page and created a fast-spreading worm, loading a custom CSS file on infected profiles that made them look like MySpace profiles.[91] Incidentally, both users are now employed by Facebook. On April 19 2006, a user was able to embed an iframe into his profile and load a custom off-site page featuring a streaming video and a flash game from Drawball. He has since been banned from Facebook.[92] On March 26 2006, a user was able to embed JavaScript in the "Hometown" field of his profile which imported his custom CSS.[93] In each case, Facebook quickly patched the holes, typically within hours of their discovery. In July 2007, a user discovered a cross-site scripting (XSS) hole in the Facebook Platform that could inject JavaScript into profiles, which was used to import custom CSS and demonstrate how the platform could be used to violate privacy rules or create a worm.[94] This hole took Facebook two and a half weeks to fix.[95]

Criticisms

Lawsuit from Connectu.com
This article documents an lawsuit.
Information may change rapidly as the suit progresses.
Founder of Facebook.com, Mark Zuckerberg, has been accused of illegally using both the concept and source code from competing site Connectu.com. In November 2003, ConnectU engaged Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard, to complete the computer programming for their website. Upon joining the ConnectU team, Zuckerberg was given full access to the website source code. Allegedly, Zuckerberg intentionally hampered the development of ConnectU while using code originally intended for ConnectU in the development of Facebook.

Since its original filing in Massachusetts the lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice due to technicality on March 28 2007, but was never ruled on. It was refiled soon thereafter in U.S. District Court in Boston, and a preliminary hearing was scheduled for July 25 2007.[96] Facebook asked the district court to dismiss the case. The attorneys representing Facebook referred to the allegations as "broad brush", "false" and that they are unsubstantiated with evidence.

Aaron Greenspan & houseSYSTEM
Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg claims that he created the original college social networking system, before either Facebook or ConnectU were founded.

Privacy concerns
There have been some concerns expressed regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining. Theories have been written about the possible misuse of Facebook and privacy proponents have criticised the site's current privacy agreement. According to the policy, "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile." However, some features—such as AIM away-message harvesting and campus newspaper monitoring—have been dropped and Facebook has since responded to the concerns. Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done "for the CIA or any other group."[100] However, the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14 2005.

Another clause that some users are critical of reserves the right to sell users' data to private companies, stating "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." This concern has also been addressed by spokesman Chris Hughes who said "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."[102] It is unclear if Facebook plans to remove that clause as well.

Recently serious privacy concerns have been raised over the security of 3rd party applications that users may install on Facebook (for example vampires, super poke etc). Third party applications have access to almost all user information and "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information."
Facebook staff have the authority to view profiles in the event that the person is suspected of violating the site's terms of service.

In August 2007 the code used to dynamically generate Facebook's home and search page as visitors browse the site was accidentally made public, according to leading internet news sites. A configuration problem on a Facebook server caused the PHP code to be displayed instead of the web page the code should have created, raising concerns about how secure private data on the site was. A visitor to the site copied, published and later removed the code from his web forum, claiming he had been served legal notice by Facebook. Facebook's response was quoted by the site that broke the story.
A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.
In the UK, the Trade Union Council has encouraged employers to allow their staff to access Facebook and other social networking sites from work, provided they proceed with caution[108].

In September 2007, Facebook drew a fresh round of criticism after it began allowing non-members to search for users, with the intent of opening limited "public profiles" up to search engines such as Google in the following months[109].

Similar services in other languages
Facebook clones throughout the world include:

* StudiVZ — offered in a number of countries, including:
* Germany: studiVZ.de ()
* France: studiQG.fr
* Italy: studiLN.it ()
* Spain: estudiLN.es ()
* Poland: studentIX.pl
* Hungary: iwiw.hu
* Australia: studentface.com.au
* China: xiaonei.com ()
* Russia: vkontakte.ru ()
* South America unibicate.com
* Turkey: studentSN.com , unihayat.com , youniTR
* Esperanto - Amikumu.com

All these sites share Facebook's success in their corresponding countries to a certain extent, according to Alexa.
Statistics
(Approximate numbers as of August 2007).[110]

* Active users: 47 million (as of October 2007)[111]
* Monthly new user average: 4 million
* Daily new user average: 150,000
* Page views: Over 15 billion per month
* Searches: Over 500 million per month[112]
* Search index size: 200GB
* Largest networks: London, UK 1,268,000 and Toronto, Canada 859,000 [113]
* Traffic rank: 7th[4]
* Photos: 1.7 billion (which averages to about 44 photos per user) [114]

On March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com of American youths in the United States discovered Facebook was the most viewed site among all respondents with more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the site than males (56%).

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