Facebook

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Facebook
Facebook logo Facebook wordmark
Screenshot
Login screen (2019)
Type of site
Social networking service
Available in112 languages[1]
List of languages
Multilingual
Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dutch (België), English (UK), English (US), English (upside down), Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), Frisian, Fula, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Japanese (Kansai), Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian (bokmal), Norwegian (nynorsk), Odia, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sardinian, Serbian, Shona, Silesian, Simplified Chinese (China), Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Sorani Kurdish, Spanish, Spanish (Spain), Swahili, Swedish, Syriac, Tajik, Tamazight, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Tetun, Thai, Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong), Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh and Zaza
FoundedFebruary 4, 2004; 20 years ago (2004-02-04) in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Area servedWorldwide, except blocking countries
OwnerMeta Platforms
Founder(s)
CEOMark Zuckerberg
URLfacebook.com
RegistrationRequired (to do any activity)
UsersIncrease 2.94 billion monthly active users (as of 31 March 2022)[2]
LaunchedFebruary 4, 2004; 20 years ago (2004-02-04)
Current statusActive
Written inC++, Hack (as HHVM) and PHP
[3][4][5]

Facebook (sometimes shortened to FB) is a social networking service and website started in February 4, 2004. It was built by Mark Zuckerberg. It is owned by Meta, Inc.[6] As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users.[7] Users may make a personal profile, add other users as friends, and send messages. Facebook users must register before using the site. The name of the service comes from the name for the book given to students at the start of the school year by some universities in the United States. These books help students get to know each other better. Facebook allows any users who are at least 13 years old to become users of the website.

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[8] The website's membership was only for Harvard students at first. Later it included other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It eventually opened for students at other universities. After that, it opened to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. Based on ConsumersReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts. This breaks the website's rules.[9]

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.[10] Entertainment Weekly put the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list. It said, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"[11] Quantcast estimates Facebook had 138.9 million monthly different U.S. visitors in May 2011.[12] According to Social Media Today, in April 2010 about 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account. Facebook's growth started to slow down in some areas. The site lost 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011 relative to previous statistics.[13]

Criticism[change | change source]

Facebook has been involved in many controversies over privacy.[14] Some of these controversies have been about people being able to see personal information that other people post, and others are about companies and advertisers being able to see users' personal information. Facebook has sent ads to people based on the persons gender, age, income, national origin and sexual orientation.[15]

Research published in the journal PLOS ONE has shown that Facebook may be responsible for spreading unhappiness through society as well as keeping people connected.[16] Scientists found that the more time people spent on Facebook over a two-week period, the worse they subsequently felt.[16] "On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it."[17]

Facebook Gaming[change | change source]

In 2018, Facebook launched Facebook Gaming officially on June 1, 2018 with a pool of gaming streamers including Darkness429, Stonemountain64, ThePoolshark, and Alodia Gosiengfiao.[18][19][20]

Facebook Gaming or fb.gg is Facebook's take on gaming livestreams where gamers and fans interact. Facebook launched it as a tab on the Facebook app and a standalone app.[21] It also has an In-stream Rewards feature where viewers are gifted in-game rewards while watching streams with Mobile Legends: Bang Bang being a part of pioneering the feature as mentioned by Jack Li, a Facebook Gaming representative, on Moonton Epicon held last July 18, 2019.[22]

In 2019, Jeremy "DisguisedToast" Wang was signed to Facebook Gaming in a surprise move from Twitch.[23] Soon after, Facebook signed Super Smash Bros. star streamer Gonzalo "ZerO" Barrios.

On February 18, 2020 Ronda Rousey performed her first live stream on Facebook Gaming, announcing that she will stream once per week. The details of her contract were not disclosed.[24]

On April 20, 2020 Facebook launched its gaming app in Playstore, named as Facebook Gaming. This app was actually planned to release in June 2020, but Facebook preponed on witnessing the community demand.[25][26]

References[change | change source]

  1. "Facebook Interface Languages". Facebook (Select your language). Archived from the original on January 26, 2021. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
  2. "Facebook Reports First Quarter 2022 Results". Facebook Investor Relations. March 31, 2022. Archived from the original on June 5, 2023. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
  3. "Our History". Facebook. Archived from the original on November 15, 2015. Retrieved November 7, 2018.
  4. Clarke, Gavin (February 2, 2010). "Facebook re-write takes PHP to an enterprise past". The Register. Situation Publishing. Archived from the original on May 28, 2020. Retrieved March 23, 2017.
  5. Levin, Sam (July 3, 2018). "Is Facebook a publisher? In public it says no, but in court it says yes". The Guardian. Archived from the original on February 21, 2021. Retrieved June 23, 2019.
  6. Eldon, Eric (December 18, 2008). "2008 Growth Puts Facebook In Better Position to Make Money". VentureBeat. San Francisco. Retrieved December 19, 2008.
  7. "Facebook Tops Billion-User Mark". The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones. October 4, 2012. Archived from the original on October 4, 2012. Retrieved October 4, 2012.
  8. Carlson, Nicholas (March 5, 2010). "At Last – The Full Story Of How Facebook Was Founded". Business Insider.
  9. "Five million Facebook users are 10 or younger". ConsumerReports.org. May 10, 2011. Archived from the original on May 12, 2011. Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  10. Kazeniac, Andy (February 9, 2009). "Social Networks: Facebook Takes Over Top Spot, Twitter Climbs". Compete Pulse blog. Archived from the original on February 11, 2009. Retrieved February 17, 2009.
  11. Geier, Thom (December 11, 2009). "THE 100 Greatest Movies, TV Shows, Albums, Books, Characters, Scenes, Episodes, Songs, Dresses, Music Videos, and Trends that entertained us over the 10 Years". Entertainment Weekly. No. (1079/1080):74-84. Jensen, Jeff; Jordan, Tina; Lyons, Margaret; Markovitz, Adam; et al. New York.
  12. "facebook.com – Quantcast Audience Profile". Quantcast. Quantcast.com. April 29, 2011. Archived from the original on November 7, 2006. Retrieved May 15, 2011.
  13. "Is Facebook growth stalling in North America?". CNN. Retrieved June 21, 2011.
  14. "Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy [INFOGRAPHIC]". mashable.com. August 25, 2010. Retrieved February 24, 2011.
  15. Facebook to make jobs, credit advertisements searchable for all users
  16. 16.0 16.1 "Not happy: Facebook linked to a decline in wellbeing". The Sydney Morning Herald. August 16, 2013. p. 6.
  17. Kross, Ethan (August 14, 2013). Philippe Verduyn, Emre Demiralp, Jiyoung Park, David Seungjae Lee, Natalie Lin, Holly Shablack, John Jonides, Oscar Ybarra. "Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults". PLOS ONE. 8 (8): e69841. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...869841K. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069841. PMC 3743827. PMID 23967061.
  18. "Facebook launches Fb.gg gaming video hub to compete with Twitch". TheRockie. July 15, 2023. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  19. "Facebook is expected to launch its game-streaming platform and Twitch competitor at E3 2018- Technology News, Firstpost". Tech2. June 8, 2018. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  20. "Facebook launching new Gaming Tab". GamesIndustry.biz. March 14, 2019. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  21. Perez, Sarah (March 15, 2019). "In a challenge to Twitch and YouTube, Facebook adds 'Gaming' to its main navigation". TechCrunch.
  22. "New Game, Major Update - World Championship and more revealed in MOONTON Epicon 2019: The Future Begins Global Conference". ABS-CBN Sports. July 24, 2019. Archived from the original on October 29, 2019.
  23. Reyes, Mariel Soto. "Twitch just lost another star streamer, this time to Facebook Gaming". Business Insider. Retrieved February 19, 2020.
  24. Barrabi, Thomas (February 14, 2020). "Ronda Rousey lands Facebook Gaming streaming deal". FOXBusiness. Retrieved February 22, 2020.
  25. "Facebook launched a dedicated app 'Facebook Gaming' to take on Twitch and YouTube". Androidical. April 20, 2020. Retrieved May 4, 2020.
  26. Schiesel, Seth (April 19, 2020). "Facebook to Introduce an App for Gaming". The New York Times. Retrieved May 4, 2020.

Other websites[change | change source]

https://www.facebook.com/