What is Facebook?
Facebook (formerly [thefacebook]) is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] The founders had initially limited the website's membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, theIvy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high-school students. Facebook now allows anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.
How does Facebook make money?
On Friday Facebook went public, with a value of £66billion. Since then shares have crashed and investigations and law suits launched as people try and work out what it’s really worth – so the question is: If the networking site is free to join and use, how exactly does it make money?
Facebook’s figures are quite astonishing. The site’s initial public offering (IPO) was priced at $38 a share, giving the site a $104billion (£66billion) valuation and making it the third-largest offering in US history.
That rated Facebook as bigger than Amazon (£62billion), Cisco (£57billion) but behind Google(£129billion) and Apple (£315billion).
Not bad for a site that’s only eight years old and was set up by students in a Harvard dorm. It now has 900 million
