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Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
Product
Facebook’s simplified navigation gives users easy access to core site functions and applications. Profile, Friends, Networks and Inbox – pages core to the user experience on Facebook – have a prominent place at the top of the user’s profile page. Facebook applications – Photos, Notes, Groups, Events and Posted items – are displayed on the left side bar, along with any third-party applications a user has added to their account.
Technology
Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system, and has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.
Privacy
Facebook has led the industry in giving people tools to control the information they share and with whom they choose to share it. User privacy has always been a top priority for the company, which has worked with such organizations as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and WiredSafety. Facebook is TrustE certified. Users also have the ability to share and restrict information based on specific friends or friend lists.
Platform
Facebook Platform is a development platform that enables companies and engineers to deeply integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users through the social graph. Facebook is a part of millions of people’s lives all around the world providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build a business that is highly relevant to people’s lives. More information can be found at http://developers.facebook.com.
Facebook: How to Create A Fan Page
The video above explains how to create a fan page on Facebook. Its a little lengthy, but the information is good. Fan pages are a great way to get more friends from facebook involved in a specific area witha specific topic. Try it out for an activity! This video makes it easy to do so.
Activities
Facebook is incredibly popular. Im sure you have your own Facebook page. But being able to utilize all of its tools allows you and your Facebook profile to become much more than just a place to see what your friends are up to. Try creating a facebook fan page from the tutorial above and use it to expand where your profile reaches. There are thousands of people out there looking around for potential employers, friends, etc. A fan page is a good and easy way to create an are where other users on Facebook can gather.
Another activity that I have done recently was me and my fiancee' created multiple fan pages for our friends to post things for the wedding. It was mainly meant for the posting of their addresses so we could have them when sending out save the dates. But it became so much more. It was a place where our friends could come wish us well and tell us congratulations etc. It was a different way to keep in touch, using the tools given by Facebook.