Week 7 Presentation

Facebook was founded in 2004 by a Mark Zuckerberg, originally designed to act as a social networking site for the Harvard university campus at which Zuckerberg studied. It quickly gained popularity and before long had spread to MIT, both Boston college and Boston university as well as all the Ivy League schools. Fast forward to the present and Facebook has become the largest social networking websites on the Internet today and made its founder, a multi-millionaire.

The success of facebook lies in the fact that the more users that sign up and use it, the better it becomes, a key aspect of the Web 2.0 ethos. With this in mind Facebook has gone from strength to strength and in recent months launched an advertising feature called ‘Facebook Marketplace’ which allowed users to post private sales, much like you would in a local newspaper. Continuing on this theme Facebook then allowed businesses to advertise their wares directly on facebook using something called ‘Facebook Beacon’. This means that whenever you logged on and were presented with your facebook homepage, you are greeted with an advertisment based on your surfing habits and the information Facebook has collected about you. For instance on my particularly facebook profile I am often presented with offers on student accommodation in the Coventry area, but also cars, books and films. For a business to able to have this kind of coverage to literally millions of people without directly targeting them is invaluable, with many industry experts predicting in the future that this form of web advertising will become the key media for promotion.

As of recent times Facebook has come under fire for privacy issues. The main problem facing facebook in this area is the fact that even once you have ‘deleted’ your facebook profile, the information that they have gathered on you remains on their database. Who’s to say that they will then not supply this information to business’s who in turn sign you up to mailing lists based on the surfing habits Facebook has documented? Facebook’s privacy policy can be found at the following URL;

http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

In relation to this issue, Facebook employee’s have been accussed of logging on to user profiles, changing aspects of it such as the picture or about me section and also viewing dates on restricted profiles. The following website goes into further detail as well as expanding on how facebook are very vague when it comes to their privacy policy meaning that the language could be open to personal interpretation.

Resoruces on Facebook:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/06/magazines/fortune/fastforward_facebook.fortune/index.htm – Why it’s important
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook – Definition and other information
http://www.doshdosh.com/facebook-marketing-resources/ – A portal website linking to many articles based around Facebook