Facebook

Facebook is one of the social networking services that is famous nowadays. This particular website was launched on February 2004. Operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc. In order to have a Facebook account, users must first register to the website. Once an account is created, users can create profile with photos, list of personal interest, contact information, and other personal information.

Facebook users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest group and "like pages", some of which are preserved by organizations as a means of advertising.

For those users who are concern about their privacy, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile. The Web site is free to users, and generates profits from advertising. Facebook requires a users's name and profile picture (if possible) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in search, through privacy settings.

The founders of Facebook known as Mark Zuckerberg with his college room-mates and some other fellow students. The Web site was first created for the Harvard students, then expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the ivy League, and Stanford University. Supported by many students from other college and universities, Facebook then opened the site's membership to high school students, and eventually to anyone aged 13 and above.

The media often compares  the Facebook website and the MySpace website. However, there is one major difference between those two website, which is the level of customization. Another difference is that Facebook required its users to give their true identity, a demand that MySpace does not make.

MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, while Facebook allows only plain text. Facebook also provides a number of features in which users may interact. The features include the Wall (a space on every user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the users to see), Pokes (which will allow users to send a virtual "poke" to each other), Photos (users may uplode albums and photos), and Status (allows users to inform their friends of their location and activities).

Facebook is built in PHP which is combined with HipHop for PHP, a source code transform built by Facebook engineers that turns PHP into CC++. According to an interview that was conducted on 2012 with Chuck Rossi, a build engineer at Facebook, Facebook compiles into a 1.5Gb binary blob which later was distributed to the servers using a custom BitTorrent-based release system. Rossi said that it will take about 15 minutes to build and 15 minutes more to release it to the servers.

FACEBOOK