Réseau social Facebook

Facebook

« Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected ». This is what you can read on facebook website.

On february the 4th 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a student in second year at Harvard University, founded « the facebook », a free access social networking. It was first restricted to students of Harvard, but in March 2004, the network expanded to Stanford, Yale and Colombia. In september 2005, he launched a highschool version. This version first necessited an invitation to join. Finally, on September 2006, facebook was opened to anyone over 13 years old and with a valid email adress.

Facebook is a social networking tool. It was first supposed to help friends among students identify and gather in some sort of a circle. Now, facebook is more than this. Through facebook, you are not only connected with people class-mates, but also with your former classmates, childhood friends, relatives, people you met during the last holiday, or even random strangers you just met.

This sudden increase of diffusion of the network is due to the « theory of the degrees of separation », elaborated by Stanley Milgram. According to him, two random strangers, or people who don’t know each other at all, for example one in New York and the other one in Paris, have very important chances to be connected through 5,5 degrees, which means through a chain of 5,5 intermediaries.

But this idea of a social networking online is not new. Before facebook, we remember hi5, myspace, or even skyblog in France.

What is special about Facebook is its ability to create an identity, an image. People can add new friends, send them messages, write something on their wall, but above all, they can join different networks organized by cities, workplaces, schools, that will connect them to other people, members in these networks. People can also join different groups, upload pictures and tag their friends on it, chat with people...

Facebook is really a dynamic concept, and a constantly innovating utility, there is always something new : someone wants to be your friend, someone invites you to an event, someone changed his or her profile picture… This is why most of people who use facebook connect everyday or even several times a day to check what is new in the network.

Facebook has become so famous that now it is being translated in several other languages besides English : chinese, french, german, italian, russian, polish, korean, turkish… The facebook success is all around the world.

According to comScore, facebook is the leader in social networking, based on the number of monthly unique visitors. Facebook overtook its main competitor, MySpace, in April 2008. In June 2008, about 132 millions unique visitors logged in to Facebook, whereas MySpace attracted about 117 millions. The gap since then didn’t cease to increase between the two competitors.

The main problem with facebook is privacy. You cannot really refuse a friendship request from a close relative like your mother. But then it means you will have to be careful with your pictures online, with what is written on you wall, with people you are friends with. You could block her, again talking about your mother, but it’s not enough. People can easily access to photos of you added by others. And now, it has

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