Social Networks: Facebook

Social Networks: Facebook

Since Facebook was produced in 2004, it has become phenomenon of the internet. It has become known internationally with more than nine hundred million users to date. Mark Zuckerberg and some of his Harvard University classmates made the internet sensation. At first, the only intention of Facebook was for networking sites for only the rest of the Harvard students. When they realized it was a bigger hit than they thought, they decided to expand. Facebook is now one of the top used networking sites on the internet.

Facebook's mission is "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." Online personal socializing is the key. Facebook allows their users to post daily status updates, which gives the user the freedom to say anything that they want to write. It also allows users to post multimedia or share multimedia with their friends in the forms of music, pictures or videos that they have recorded themselves. It also allows its users to connect by sending private messages to just one person a number of selected people. Every aspect of Facebook is designed to help its users to enjoy the most of the networking site.

Not only is Facebook for individual users, but it is also for marketing and businesses. Facebook allows businesses to connect with their fans or clientele. A business on Facebook can create their personal pages where they can post content to update their information, sell merchandise, manage customer service, and provide any news. Businesses can also target a large amount of clients or potential customers by creating ads that are tailored specifically for the group of people that they are trying to reach. Because Facebook is free, it needs to find a way to create revenue from other resources. Businesses making ads is the way to do it. Advertisement products include self-serve advertising, in which the advertisers themselves can create and market their own Facebook campaign through online serves and interactive ads.

Privacy is also a part of the content of this networking site. Facebook allows a user to control who sees what on their profile. For example, if a user has one hundred friends and did not want five of those friends to see what they were posting, the user would simply select which people he/she wanted to keep from seeing it and then save the changes. From then on, the only people that would be able to see the user's posts, are the rest of the users he/she did not select. Another privacy setting is the option for a user to control who can send them a friend request or message. Facebook also allows a user to block another from ever seeing their information or messaging them again if there is harassment or just unwanted contact. Many of Facebook's users have found the privacy settings to be useful and user friendly.

To get a better sense of how actual users of Facebook feel about the site, the writer of this essay decided to interview. Rebecca Wilhite, age 15, says "Facebook is so much fun for me. I love that I can talk to my friends when they're out of town or anything. It makes it easier for me to keep up with family as well since most of my family lives out of state." Lucia Eggert, age 20, says, "I think Facebook was a good idea. It lets many people keep in touch easily, especially the lazy kind of people, like me, who