FACEBOOK

Introduction : Facebook, is a new innovation. It offers you an opportunity to interact with an extraordinarily expansive universe of new people. You can sculpt your on-line identity and learn more about how the Internet and its various programs work to create new relationships and communities. For the entrepreneurially minded, it might be an introduction into business as you think of how to "market" yourself. People make the technology, not only in the fundamental sense of discovery and invention, but also in the sense that they make it happen and that they contour it in ways that reflect our basic humanity. Our basic humanity is for better or for worse. It is vulnerable to context, circumstance and interpretation. And so it is important to remember that Facebook is malleable and creates as many obligations as it does opportunities for expression. Below are parts about Facebook. In one hand, well talk about this new concept, in the other hand well talk about the economical and technological aspect and finally, well mention the good and the bad side of this phenomenon.

I/ Description of the concept

Facebook is a social networking website launched on February 4, 2004. The Facebook headquarter sets place in Palo Alto (California). Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes founded Facebook while they were students at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Ivy League. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website is named: www.facebook.com and it refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus. The free-access website is privately owned and operated by Facebook, Incorporation. The first goal of this type of network is to make contacts on the model of a friend circle.It allows people to create special links between each others and lets permit them to display their tastes and personal life: musical tastes, photos, friends, movies, passions, pictures and so on. According to the researcher Christine Rosen, This explosion of networks with contacts, reminds the theory of the degrees of separation, elaborated by Stanley Milgram, according to which two persons taken at random can be connected by using on average 5,5 intermediary !Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves. The site is still especially popular among the students and the new graduates, who use it as first tool of communication between them. Million of students look at their Facebook pages several times a day and spend hours to send and to receive messages, to fix meetings, to get informed of activities of their friends, to learn it more on people whom they met recently or of whom they heard of. The website currently has more than 110 million active users worldwide including 16 million users in Europe (1million in France since the site is launched here in May 2007!). Other data, the number of users in October 2007 is on average of 50 million, 60 percent of the connections are daily and an important precision is that more than the half of users consulting daily www.facebook.com stays on average twenty minutes! The site is now available in so many languages like in Catalan, Chinese , Czech, Danish, Dutch, English , Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian (bokml), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian),

Russian, Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Welsh Facebook is classified in the 1st rank of the sites of photos sharing in the United States and this is the 7th site the most visited in the world behind Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Windows Live, MSN and MySpace (the most famous competitor!), the first in Canada (ten percent of the population is subscribed!) and in Norway (twenty percent).

II/Economy and technology

We can give some important figures about the economy of facebook. The facebooks turnover was estimated in 2008 at 150 million dollars. Moreover, 1.6 percent of the capital was bought back by Microsoft in October 2007 for 240 billion dollars which increase the value of the society at 15 billion dollars! Beside Microsoft becomes the only advertising provider of facebook. The fact that Facebook is opened to the third applications since May 2007 contributed to the success of the site, numerous designers, beginners or experts, do not hesitate to propose their applications, that they intend themselves for Web or for local use.. Tools and processing racks (framework, API, samples of code) have been suggested to the developers who can format their conceptions in the standards of Facebook. The FBML, for example, which was establishes as the language of standard layout on Facebook, looks like the understandable HTML for the developers, but it is sometimes more or less binding. Any programmers have consequently the possibility of creating applications inserted into the site, to broadcast them as a whole thanks to " social graph ", and to take advantage from it as hear it (by advertising, sale of services, etc). According to Facebook, there were on November 30th, 2007 more than 8 000 applications, official or unofficial which were already created and some are already promoted in several million dollars. On July 23rd, 2008, Facebook presented the last advances of the platform Facebook during its annual conference F8 developers, calling its developers, the number of which exceeds 400 000, to connect their Web sites to Facebook via Facebook Connect. But there is some flaw in the platform like what happened in august 2007 : a part of the source code of the index page was hacked and published on the web. Facebook is not a website, it is a protocol, an infrastructure, the equivalent of a software of e-mail as hotmail or Gmail, except on Facebook we can share and exchange particulars rather than just send emails. In other words, you should not think of Facebook as if it was a website. It is a standard of exchange of particulars between individuals. This standard has even a name: FBML for Facebook Markup Language whose. Moreover, as they can create Web sites in HTML, the other developers can use the FBML to create applications on Facebook as "iLike " or "vampire". In view of the fact that Facebook is an application, the economic circles begin to be interested in its economic model. Make turn a site of this size represents a cost. The numerous slowings down which affect Facebook are the proof. The first analyses emphasized the potential offered by the constitution of a base of relatively complete datum of the users, the possibilities offered by the different mechanisms of avatar (purchases of presents in $1, service premium, etc), or on opportunity to make pay third applications to ameliorate their quality of service (show photographs desire widget slide.com faster).

III/ Social Impact

Facebook has become one of the leading social networking sites on the Internet today. It is used by millions of people around the world; there are high school students, college students, family members and friends using this tool to simply keep in touch with one another, while other

people have come to use Facebook for business purposes. It is simply a multi billion-dollar organization that has affected the way people communicate today. It is apparent that Facebook has such an eminent control over its users; nevertheless it is the user who must determine whether this is a good or bad control. The history of Facebook may or may not play a role in ones opinion of social networking, however we feel that being educated on the subject will allow for an informed final decision. Originally it began as a social network within Harvard that eventually continued to connect other students throughout other Boston colleges and universities. By the end of 2005, Facebook had allowed colleges from around the world to join the network and within a few months high schools were being incorporated into the social network as well. Finally, by September of that year, anyone with an email could join. This search can be as limited as the user permits, however it enables you to remain close to friends you saw last week or those you have not been given the opportunity to speak with for several years. One must remember that Facebook is a very personal piece of technology. You can display a picture of yourself for your profile, you can describe your likes, dislikes and many interests, you can report to your friends whether or not you are listed as single, you can share your birthday and your age, you can let others tag photos of you and you can even post a video of you and or your friends online. It can be used to track down old childhood chums, it can also be used to list your top friends or share your mood. Depending on how the user has arranged their personal settings it is possible for people to whom you have no knowledge of, to view the photos, videos and comments that you or your friends have posted. Also, Facebook could ultimately lead to Internet stalking. There is a block or high privacy option available, but hackers and stalkers have ways of getting around these controls. If this piece of technology is used incorrectly or carelessly, the damages could be fatal. For example during May of 2007, there was an alleged rumor of a suicide pact, claiming that every two weeks one student from St. Joan of Arc Catholic School were to commit suicide. Two students unfortunately took their own lives and while the dates were exactly two weeks apart this was merely a coincidence. Nevertheless there were approximately 17 names of students who declared that they would take their own lives as well. Conclusion : Facebook is a great innovation that allows users to express their humanity, meet new or former friends and an opportunity to create new communities. It represents a forum in which one can make choices about their identity. That freedom does not suggest that one can do so without consequences. Facebook is a great way to contact former friends, to create applications, to send messages But it can also be a non privacy with applications like photo, personal information

Source : wikipdia , vido en franais :

http://www.koreus.com/video/facebook-realite.html

http://www.nonfiction.fr/article-364-comprendre_facebook_et_linternet_social.htm