oh internet

The world's largest social networking service

Summary

Facebook, the world's largest social networking service, is one of the many popular tools by which people document every aspect of their lives ad nauseam, giving out copious amounts of personal data to be used for targeted advertising. It's an especially popular casual gaming platform, with applications such as Farmville quickly becoming more popular than traditional games.

Headquartered in the United States, Facebook is infamous for its cavalier attitude towards user privacy. The majority of scandals about Facebook involve the site changing its settings around without notification, exposing that private album of pictures that were just for you and your boyfriend to the entire the world, or suddenly revealing all your recent Amazon purchases to your friend lists.

Sites like youropenbook.org take advantage of the fact that many users are unaware of how much of their information is publicly posted by allowing you to search the updates of millions of users who have not changed their privacy settings.

Origins

Facebook has gotten big enough that its origins have been made into an Oscar-winning movie called The Social Network. As it's one of very few articles on this website to have its own movie, you really should probably see it.

But for those who prefer textual information over dramatized movies, Facebook was preceded by Facemash in October of 2003 when Mark Zuckerberg hacked some ID directories at Harvard to create a college version of Hot or Not. It was shut down by the Harvard administration and Zuckerberg was almost expelled. In February 2004 he launched "thefacebook.com", which was originally just for Harvard but eventually expanded to almost every other university, requiring a university email address to register.

Open the Floodgates

Limiting access to those with a college email was arguably one of the benefits of the old Facebook. In 2005, the site was opened to high schoolers as well. In September of 2006, Facebook finally opened to anyone above 13 years of age with an email address.

Current status

Facebook has replaced Myspace and Friendster as the default social networking site in many countries and has made Mark Zuckerberg into the world's youngest billionaire. Statuses tend to vary by age group, but teenagers tend to post "I just lost the remote.... fml", twenty somethings tend to post song lyrics and anyone older than that tends to post their location.

On forums and message boards, Facebook is seen as the Internet equivalent of Wal-mart, gobbling up small local cool sites with thriving communities and bastardizing memes and Image Macros by giving them to the masses who exchange them with poor spelling and ruin the joke somehow.

Facts

Images

What happened here?	This is sad. I am sad.	He probably is genuinely 12.	Images, eh.
yhhjjkjkjhj		hurr	It appears Facebook upgraded the front page today.
Picture 6 from ED Facebook.	HERP DERP DERP	Um.	gallery of Facebook image macros
fake facebook for t3h lulz	Warning - Facebook is SERIOUS BUSINESS	gallery of Facebook image macros	Kids these days are original. They know how to use a camera.
Remember kids, your employer can use facebook too.	News feed, right?	Those stupid facebook quizzes. They're all stupid.	I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS
What is english.	JUST WANT TO BE LOVED	Like Failbook.jpg, but actually looks something like the original.	omg bandwagon
Oh, Internet.	what are verbs	Rose West and Josef Fritzl are both pimpin' up yo Failbook.	Don't visit that link by the way.
Mudkip logs into Facebook to play Stock Wars, only to find that over the Martin Luther King holiday, someone stole his nintendo stock.	This is the kind of photo that makes your employer reconsider hiring you.	So anyway he's disgusted that his mum hopes she's his favourite MILF but likes MILFs anyway. What.	Witchcraft?
BONUS ROUND: Make a movie/comic out of this captcha.	contender for the most epic win of all time	Lol	Mark Zuckerberg finally caves
			What.
This sums it up.	This should be the status all the time.	I think we're all on a computer here.	I don't know what this is.

Videos

Related Pages

Annoying Facebook Girl

Foursquare

Friendster

Google+

Linkedin

Makeoutclub

Mark Zuckerberg

Mixi

MySpace

Ning

Orkut

Vkontakte

Winklevoss Twins

External Links

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