Facebook Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Facebook - Essay Example Business, marketing, advertising, politics etc are some segments in which facebook contributed heavily to the global public apart from providing instant communication opportunities. The recent political developments in Arab world are believed to be stimulated by facebook. In fact the current Arab revolution is referred as facebook revolution. â€Å"The dictator of Tunisia was overthrown in less than one month after being in power for 23 years. There is no question about how opponents of his regime were able to topple it. Two words describe it: Facebook, Twitter†. In Libya also facebook contributed heavily for the expulsion of Gadhafi. In short, the influence of facebook over human life is growing day by day. â€Å"Facebook was founded in 2004 by a former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg†. He has also pointed out that â€Å"facebook and its idea spread across the college campus within months from launching and at present it is the second largest social networking site, s econd only to my space as far as traffic is concerned†. The founding of facebook has raised some controversies about the ownership of the idea of facebook. Mark Zuckerberg was accused of stealing the idea of his college roommates and fellow computer science students. Anyway, it is a fact that in early 2003 itself, the idea of creating a social network was in the mind of Zuckerberg. In fact he has started another social network Buddy Zoo in 2003 itself with the help of some of his close friends. In January 2004, Zuckerberg started writing the source codes of facebook and on February 4, he launched Thefacebook. In 2005, the name Thefacebook has been changed to Facebook. Controversies regarding the founding of facebook Former Harvard classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss claim that Zuckerberg stole their idea for a social networking site whilst he was employed by them to assist with the sites development, the site in question being connectu.com. They filed a lawsuit as early as 2004 but the case was dismissed in March 2007, although it was quickly re-filed in Boston, eventually Facebook settled the case for $65m (Ryankette, 2011). Still there are many stories spreading about the stealing of this idea by Zuckerberg. â€Å"After Facebook announced the settlement, but before the settlement was finalized, lawyers for the Winklevosses suggested that the hard drive from Mark Zuckerberg's computer at Harvard might contain evidence of Mark's fraud†(Carlson, 2010). Critics label him as a cheat. It should be noted that besides Zuckerberg, there three co-founders for facebook; Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes. In short, the disputes about the ownership of the idea of facebook created lot of negative publicity to facebook. What made Facebook a success today? According to Shih (2009), â€Å"right this moment at least 150000000 people are interacting with friends and talking about the brands on facebook†(Shih, 2009, p.i). The success of facebook primarily lies in its ability to attract business people towards it. Business has realised the potentials of facebook quickly in conducting its marketing campaigns successfully. Facebook users normally share their ideas and opinions about the new products they might have purchased recently and this type of publicity is even better than word of mouth publicity for business people. So they have shown increased interests in posting marketing ads in facebook which helped facebook to grow considerably. Marketers can make use of targeted ads to reach specific segments of customers using facebook and that also with a minimal spending for advertising. Facebook ads are more effective and cheaper than other