An overview of Facebook

Mark Zuckerburg launched Facebook in February 2004 while attending Harvard University. Facebooks success is largely due to the environment that it was launched in, being a well respected university it was held in high esteem, making more people want to signup, another factor of Facebooks success is the intuitiveness of the application as a whole. The experience a user gets from Facebook is very positive, initially when Facebook launched the ‘News Feed’ some users we’re concerned about privacy, but this has grown to be one of the key features on the site, allowing users to quickly see what their friends have been up to in there absence. Facebook launched its application interface in May 2007 which allowing developers to extend the capabilities of the site and combine data from other sites. These applications are spread throughout the site virally with users usually sending requests through applications to other users, if you accept the request the application is installed on your profile and has access to your Facebook details. For instance the iLike application allows users to play clips of music they like on their profile, show concerts they are going to and play a music trivia quiz. The application had great success after its release, making it one of the most popular applications on the Facebook Platform. As of November 2007, iLike has more than 15 million users. With the launch of Facebooks Pages, iLike now creates pages for bands. A similar feature is also available on MySpace and Bebo. Eight months after Facebook launched its developer platform, MySpace responded with its version, the MySpace api is developed upon Googles OpenSocial platform. Many sites have already implemented OpenSocial , this  means you have less to learn to build applications for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. Some of the site currently using OpenSocial include, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.