Le réseau social FACEBOOK (document en anglais)

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, we’ll talk about this new concept, in the other hand we’ll talk about the economical and technological aspect and finally, we’ll 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 let’s 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 (bokmål), 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 facebook’s 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,

...