Facebook is a for-profit corporation and online social media and social networking service based in Menlo Park, California, United States. The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard Collegestudents and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Let’s learn some interesting facts about it!
1. The founders had initially limited the website’s membership to Harvard students; however, later they expanded it to higher education institutions in the Boston area, the Ivy League schools, and Stanford University.
2. Facebook gradually added support for students at various other universities, and eventually to high school students as well.
3. Since 2006, anyone age 13 and older has been allowed to become a registered user of Facebook, though variations exist in the minimum age requirement, depending on applicable local laws.
4. The Facebook name comes from the face book directories often given to United States university students.
5. Facebook can be accessed by a large range of desktops, laptops, tablet computers ,and smartphones over the Internet and mobile networks.
6. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile indicating their name, occupation, schools attended and so on.
7. Users can add other users as “friends”, exchange messages, post status updates and digital photos, share digital videos and links, use various software applications (“apps”), and receive notifications when others update their profiles or make posts.
8. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, hobbies or other topics, and categorize their friends into lists such as “People From Work” or “Close Friends”. In groups, editors can pin posts to top.
9. Users can, also, complain about or block unpleasant people. Because of the large volume of data that users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for its privacy policies.
10. Facebook makes most of its revenue from advertisements which appear onscreen.
11. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering (IPO) in February 2012, and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of $104 billion.
12. 600,000 hackingattempts are made to Facebook accounts every day.
13. You can change your language on Facebook to “Pirate.”
14. The average Facebook U S. user spends 40 minutes a day on the site.
15. Worldwide, there are over 1.71 billion monthly active Facebook users (Facebook MAUs) which is a 15 percent increase year over year.
16. Al Pacino was the first “face” on Facebook. A very early iteration of the site displayed a header image featuring a man’s face obscured behind binary code. The identity of the man could not be seen clearly, but it later came to light that the face was that of acclaimed actor Al Pacino.
17. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, was the first major investor to back Facebook. Thiel, a luminary in the startup and venture capital worlds, saw the site’s potential and invested $500,000 into the young company in 2004.
18. Thiel later sold his stake in the company for more than $1 billion.
19. 1.13 billion people log onto Facebook daily active users (Facebook DAU) for June 2016, which represents a 17% increase year over year
20. Sean Parker, co-founder of now-defunct music sharing site Napster, originally acquired the facebook.com domain name for $200,000.
21. Parker was the driving force in the renaming of the site, and was highly influential as the site exploded in popularity.
22. In the Facebook ecosystem there are apps and apps.1 From messaging apps including WhatsApp and Messenger, to visual apps like Instagram and even Occulus. Occulus is the virtual reality technology that Facebook bought for $2 billion just over 12 months ago.
23. Their numbers are also large by any measure. Instagram with 300 million+ users. WhatsApp with 700 million. Facebook messenger has 600 million users.
24. On average, the Like and Share Buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites daily.
25. On average there are 486,183 users a minute accessing Facebook from their mobile
26. 79% of all users are accessing Facebook from their mobile.
27. There are 745 million daily mobile users
28. Facebook is adding 7,246 people every 15 minutes or 8 per second
29. Every minute there are 150,000 messages sent
30. More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
31. More than 70 translations available on the site
32. About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
33. Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
34. Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
35. People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
36. Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
37. The meaning of the term Poke has never been defined. While Facebook explains how “poking” works on its help center, there’s no explanation to be found for the origin of the phrase.
38. The most common definition is a friendly “nudge,” but the more flirtatious connotations cannot be ignored.
39. Facebook stores approximately 300 PETABYTES of user data on its servers.
40. Several people have been murdered for unfriending someone on Facebook.
41. There are, on average, 3.74 degrees of separation between any one Facebook user and another. So you’re like, THAT close to Justin Bieber.
42. In 2014, the alleged global economic impact of Facebook was approximately $227 billion.
43. Facebook tracks which sites you visit, even AFTER you have signed out.
44. 1 in 3 people feels more dissatisfied with their lives after visiting Facebook, according to a study.
45. Facebook is primarily blue because Mark Zuckerberg suffers red-green color blindness.
46. In 2015, Facebook boasted 22% of WORLDWIDE mobile Internet advertising revenue.
47. Posts published between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. EST receive approximately 88% more interactions on average than posts published at other times of the day.
48. Facebook earns an average of $5.85 for every Facebook user in the United States and Canada.
49. There are about 30 million dead people on Facebook.
50. Facebook, Twitter and The New York Times have been blocked in China since 2009.
51. A third of all divorce filings of 2011 in the U.S. contained the word “Facebook.”
52. You can’t block Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook.
53. Videos are the most-shared content type on Facebook.
54. Age 25 to 34, at 29.7% of users, is the most common age demographic.
55. In Europe, over 307 million people are on Facebook.
56. Facebook users are 76% female (out of 100% of all females) and 66% male (out of 100% of all males)