FACEBOOK, SOCIAL MEDIA & NETWORKING SINCE 2004

The Grandma is not a great fan of social networking.

 

She is introverted, and she dislikes exposing her private life to the world, but social networking arrived to stay with us forever, and we must adapt our lives to them and try to look for what kind of things could be useful without exposing yourself a lot.

On a day like today in 2004, Facebook, a mainstream online social networking site, was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin. It is one of the most popular social networking and The Grandma wants to talk about it.

Facebook  is an American online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California, and a flagship service of the namesake company Facebook, Inc. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

The founders of Facebook initially limited membership to Harvard students. Membership was expanded to Columbia, Stanford, and Yale before being expanded to the rest of the Ivy League, MIT, and higher education institutions in the Boston area, then various other universities, and lastly high school students. Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook, though this may vary depending on local laws. The name comes from the face book directories often given to American university students.

More information: Facebook

Facebook can be accessed from devices with Internet connectivity, such as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. After registering, users can create a profile revealing information about themselves. They can post text, photos and multimedia which is shared with any other users that have agreed to be their friend, or, with a different privacy setting, with any reader.

Users can also use various embedded apps, join common-interest groups, buy and sell items or services on Marketplace, and receive notifications of their Facebook friends' activities and activities of Facebook pages they follow.  

Facebook claimed that it had 2.80 billion monthly active users as of December 2020, and it was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s globally.

Facebook has been the subject of numerous controversies, often involving user privacy, as with the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, political manipulation, as with the 2016 U.S. elections, mass surveillance, psychological effects such as addiction and low self-esteem, and content such as fake news, conspiracy theories, copyright infringement, and hate speech. 

Commentators have accused Facebook of willingly facilitating the spread of such content and also exaggerating its number of users in order to appeal to advertisers. As of January 21, 2021, Alexa Internet ranks Facebook seventh in global internet usage.

Facebook's rapid growth began as soon as it became available and continued through 2018, before beginning to decline.

Facebook passed 100 million registered users in 2008, and 500 million in July 2010. According to the company's data at the July 2010 announcement, half of the site's membership used Facebook daily, for an average of 34 minutes, while 150 million users accessed the site by mobile.

In October 2012 Facebook's monthly active users passed one billion, with 600 million mobile users, 219 billion photo uploads, and 140 billion friend connections. The 2 billion user mark was crossed in June 2017.

More information: Brandwatch

In November 2015, after scepticism about the accuracy of its monthly active users' measurement, Facebook changed its definition to a logged-in member who visits the Facebook site through the web browser or mobile app, or uses the Facebook Messenger app, in the 30-day period prior to the measurement. This excluded the use of third-party services with Facebook integration, which was previously counted.

From 2017 to 2019, the percentage of the U.S. population over the age of 12 who use Facebook has declined, from 67% to 61%, a decline of some 15 million U.S. users, with a higher drop-off among younger Americans, a decrease in the percentage of U.S. 12- to 34-year-olds who are users from 58% in 2015 to 29% in 2019. The decline coincided with an increase in the popularity of Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook Inc.

Historically, commentators have offered predictions of Facebook's decline or end, based on causes such as a declining user base; the legal difficulties of being a closed platform, inability to generate revenue, inability to offer user privacy, inability to adapt to mobile platforms, or Facebook ending itself to present a next generation replacement; or Facebook's role in Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.

More information: The Guardian

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?',
It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

Mark Zuckerberg