The Tecker

Facebook is a social networking website that by definition, "is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade" (wikipedia.org). It has become an extremely "hot" site and as of June 2008, pulled 50.6 billion page views worldwide.

The website allows users to contact friends and family. There are many a story about long-lost friends reuniting and co-workers meeting up again by using the site. But it also includes features that enable users to share pictures, videos, and play games with each other.

Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University. He intended it to become a site for college students. However as it grew, Facebook, Inc opened its service up to anyone over the age of 13.

Facebook is a free service that runs on revenue from advertising.

Facebook allows users to do many things besides sharing media with other too. Users can post "notes" which are like small blog entries, but they are not meant to be as regularly updated as a blog. Friends can post comments on each others walls about anything including photos and friend status' (a small regularly updated comment that the person posts to let others know what is happening or how they feel at the time). Also the site allows developers to create apps that can range anywhere from games to quizzes to picture editing.

Also Facebook Connect was just created that lets external sites access your profile, friend list, info, etc as a way to build contacts and simplify login procedures.

Some problems with Facebook include; recently a number of people had their friends list deleted on accident, some apps produced by external developers are buggy and cause web browsers to crash, and page loads can be extremely slow at peek times of the day .

Sometimes people also worry that by using Facebook they can have their privacy compromised, but Facebook has measures to prevent this, such as requiring users to accept that they know each other in order to add them as a friend on the service.

Overall Facebook is a wonderful service, but it just has a few minor quirks that need to be ironed out.