What is Facebook?All About Facebook

Facebook is a hugely popular social networking site that allows you to make connections, share interests, and join groups. As you may have heard, Facebook is becoming more open and social and impacting our experience of the web in ways we had not dreamed of. 

All About Facebook

• The story and success of Facebook are nearly as popular as the site itself. Here are a few facts and figures about the creation of Facebook and how people are using it.
• Facebook was started in 2004 by 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg when he was a sophomore at Harvard University.
• The website was originally called Thefacebook.com and was created to be a social version of the published "face books" that were distributed at Harvard to identify students.
• By 2006, Facebook was available to anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address.
• Facebook is the largest social network in the world with over 750 million users worldwide. (July 2011)
• The average user has 130 Friends and spends about 20 minutes on the site 40 times a month. (April 2011)
• There are nearly as many users who are 55 and over as there are users who are 17 and under. (April 2011)
• Zuckerburg has been involved in long-term legal disputes with co-founderEduardo Saverin and three other Harvard classmates (Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra) over the founding of Facebook.
• Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook have been portrayed in the popular 2010 movie "The Social Network" based on the book "The Accidental Billionaires" by Ben Mezrich.
• Zuckerberg is worth 13.5 billion dollars (April 2011) and has been ranked, along with his co-founders, as the youngest billionaires in the world. 

What Can You Do on Facebook?

Basically Facebook is a huge social network that allows its members to communicate, connect and engage with each other, both directly and through various applications and features. More significantly, Facebook is changing the way we interact on the web, making our experience much more open and social.  To get a better idea of the full scope of the Facebook experience, review the following interactive. It displays some actual examples of the various things you can do with Facebook.