Exposé en anglais sur Facebook

FACEBOOK

We chose to talk about facebook because this, is a new innovation. Million of students look at their Facebook pages several times a day and spend hours to send and to receive messages. The website currently has more than 110 million active users worldwide including 16 million users in Europe.

In one hand, we’ll talk about this new concept, in the other hand we’ll talk about the economic impact aspect and finally, we’ll mention the good and the bad side of this phenomenon.

1. Description of the concept

Facebook is a social networking website launched on February 4, 2004. The Facebook headquarter sets place in Palo Alto (California). 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 colleges in the Ivy League. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

The website is named: www.facebook.com and it refers to the « paper facebooks » depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

It offers you an opportunity to interact with an extraordinarily expansive universe of new people. You can refine your online identity and create a new relationship. The free-access website is privately owned and operated by Facebook, Incorporation. 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 and so on.

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.

The site is still especially popular among the students and the new graduates, who use it as first tool of communication between them. 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 site is now available in so many languages like in Catalan, Chinese , Czech, Danish, Dutch,English , Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese.

Facebook is classified in the 1st rank of the sites of photos sharing in the United States and this is the 7th site the most visited in the world behind Yahoo!, Google, YouTube, Windows Live, MSN and MySpace.

2. economic impact

We can give some important figures about the economy of facebook. The facebook’s turnover was estimated in 2008 at 150 million dollars. The fact that Facebook is opened to the third applications since May2007 contributed to the success of the site, numerous designers, beginners or experts, do not hesitate to propose their applications, that they intend themselves for Web or for local use. Any programmers have consequently the possibility of creating applications inserted into the site, to broadcast them as a whole thanks to " social graph ", and to take advantage from it as hear it (by advertising, sale of services, etc). According to Facebook, there were on November 30th, 2007 more than 8 000 applications, official or unofficial which were already created and some are already promoted in several million dollars.

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. It is a standard of exchange of particulars between individuals.

In view of the fact that Facebook is an application, the economic circles begin to be interested in its economic model. Make turn a site of this size represents a cost. The numerous slowings down which affect Facebook are the proof.

3. Social impact

Facebook has become one of the leading social networking sites on the Internet today. It is used by millions of people around the world; there are high school students, college students, family members and friends using this tool to simply keep in touch with one another, while other people have come to use Facebook for business purposes. It is simply a multi billion-dollar organization that has affected the way people communicate today. It is apparent that Facebook has such an eminent control over its users; nevertheless it is the user who must determine whether this is a good or bad control. The history of Facebook may or may not play a role in one’s opinion of social networking, however we feel that being educated on the subject will allow for an informed final decision.

Originally it began as a social network within Harvard that eventually continued to connect other students throughout other Boston colleges and universities. By the end of 2005, Facebook had allowed colleges from around the world to join the network and within a few months high schools were being incorporated into the social network as well. Finally, by September of that year, anyone with an email could join. This search can be as limited as the user permits, however it enables you to remain close to friends you saw last week or those you have not been given the opportunity to speak with for several years. One must remember that Facebook is a very personal piece of technology.

You can display a picture of yourself for your profile, you can describe your likes, dislikes and many interests, you can report to your friends whether or not you are listed as single, you can share your birthday and your age, you can let others tag photos of you and you can even post a video of you and or your friends online. It can be used to track down old childhood chums, it can also be used to list your best friends or share your mood.

Depending on how the user has arranged their personal settings it is possible for people to whom you have no knowledge of, to view the photos, videos and comments that you or your friends have posted. Also, Facebook could ultimately lead to Internet stalking.

Conclusion

...