Facebook

Facebook is a privately owned and operated social networking site. Users establish profiles, add their friends to their "network", send messages both privately and publicly, and easily share information with one another. The website's name stems from the name of a book given to students at founder Mark Zuckerberg's high school alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy. The book showed the faces and names of the school's students and faculty.

Facebook's growth started on the grounds of Harvard and continued to become a social networking behemoth boasting over 250 million registered users through a combination of maintaining standard aesthetics and innovation. Unlike other social networks, Facebook does not allow you free reign to customize your page with HTML snippets or CSS code. On May 24, 2007 Facebook launched the Facebook Platform for developers. This framework that integrated with core Facebook features quickly spread the progression of application usage in the network and simultaneously allowed other services to utilize the Facebook standards to create their own presence on the network.

As of April 2008, Facebook was declared by comScore as the most popular social network based on monthly unique visitors. The site is considered the most popular social network in the English speaking world. This popularity has lead it to be banned by a number of companies trying to prevent lost productivity and also the U.S. Marine Corps who cited the social network as a security risk.

Not all of Facebook's controversy comes from its popularity. The site has had a number of issues with privacy, the use of their participants information in advertising, and has even had to roll back an issued Terms Of Service (TOS) update after a community generated backlash. The Facebook Team's responsive and sensible actions to address these issues along with their commitment to continual innovation continues to propel its popularity.