Facebook (originally called thefacebook) is an online social networking service located in Menlo Park, California. Its name is inspired by the nickname for a directory (or yearbook) given to students, containing their photos and contact information.
In addition to text messages, users can send photos, videos, and audio messages (and now other file types like .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, although .exe may be prohibited) to other users, as well as share their location using integrated map features. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University roommates. Initially, Facebook membership was limited to Harvard students, but it gradually expanded to include students from other universities in the Boston area, including some Ivy League schools, MIT, NYU, Stanford University, and more. It eventually supported students from other universities and high schools, and finally opened up to anyone aged 13 or older. Now Facebook allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to register.
Users must register to use Facebook, after which they can create a personal profile, add other users as friends, send messages, and receive notifications when other users update their profiles. Users can also join groups with similar interests, which are categorized based on workplace, school, or other characteristics. Users can also manage their friends by adding them to different lists, such as "colleagues" or "close friends." As of September 2012, Facebook had over 1.1 billion active users, with about 9% of them being fake accounts. As of 2012, Facebook generated 180 petabytes (PB) of data each year and was increasing at a rate of 0.5 petabytes per day. Statistics show that 350 million photos are uploaded daily on Facebook.
User Profile
According to data from April 2007, Facebook had the largest number of users among websites targeting university students, with 34 million active users (including users outside of university networks). From September 2006 to September 2007, the site rose from 60th to 7th in the rankings of websites in the USA. At the same time, Facebook became the number one photo sharing site in the USA, with 8.5 million photos uploaded daily. This even surpassed other specialized photo-sharing sites like Flickr. In March 2010, Facebook surpassed Google in terms of user access in the USA, becoming the most accessed website in the country. By October 2012, the number of active users worldwide on Facebook exceeded 1 billion, with 600 million being mobile phone users, making it the most widely distributed social networking site in the world.
As of the fourth quarter of 2013, according to official data, about 15 million people in Taiwan log into Facebook every month, with about 12 million logging in via mobile devices, and 11 million active daily users, of which 8.5 million log in through mobile devices. The General Manager of Facebook Greater China stated that Taiwan and Hong Kong are mature markets for Facebook, ranking first and second globally in penetration rates. As of early 2014, there were approximately 360 million monthly active users and about 200 million daily active users in Asia.
As of the end of June 2015, registered users who logged into Facebook at least once a month reached 1.49 billion, accounting for about half of the 3 billion Internet users globally. Among them, approximately 65.5%, or about 968 million users, log in daily.