FACEBOOK

I/ Description of the concept

Facebook is a social networking website launched on February 4, 2004. 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 college.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.
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.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!).

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.

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.

In view of the fact that