Facebook: The Company

Facebook, launched in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, is a social networking website which currently has over 750 million users. Facebook originated as a directory for photos and information about Harvard students. Its original name was Facemash and it was shut down days after the launch, due to the fact that Zuckerberg hacked Harvard's network in order to get the ID pictures of students. In 2004 the company became incorporated and Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website, originally called Thefacebook, with membership limited to people enrolled at Harvard. Soon after, it opened up to other Ivy League schools and eventually to nearly all universities in the United States and Canada. In 2005,  the company bought the domain facebook.com, where it still resides. In the same year, facebook.com began to accept high school students, though at first it was only by invite. In 2006 it opened to everybody 13 and older, becoming the website as we know it today. Since then, facebook.com has been growing steadily and over 20,000 disallowed profiles are removed every day for various infractions. For 2011, the estimated revenue of Facebook is between $4 billion and $12 billion, up from $2 billion in 2010 and $52 million in 2006. Most of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, with an estimated $2.2 billion coming from ad revenue in 2011.

In order to keep up with users' need to connect with friends and family, Facebook introduced video chat in partnership with Skype in July 2011. Beyond this, Facebook is working on integrating users' favorite music, movies, tv shows and other media into the website, in order to become a hub for various types of internet activities. In an attempt to take down their competitor, Google, Facebook hired a public relations firm to persuade reporters to write negative reports on Google's new service, Social Circles. This ties back to the ongoing struggle over privacy on Facebook. In August 2011, Facebook revamped its privacy controls yet again, in an attempt to quell the concerns of its users. In regards to advertising, Facebook Ads Product Director, Gokul Rajaram recently told reporters at TechCrunch that advertising was migrating from traditional ads to entirely network-driven ads. These ads, called "Social Ads" and "Sponsored Stories", are organically created from user content, instead of originating in a computer algorithm. This is important to Facebook since it has been predicted that a user will be more likely to purchase a product that a friend has recommended or "liked". With the user base reaching its saturation point, Facebook is looking to other avenues in order to keep revenue up and the user base interested. With the new competitor Google+, the people at Facebook need to stay on their toes in order to stay ahead in the game.