Facebook

Facebook was the first social media company to be globally successful and widespread. There were others before it including Myspace. However Myspace never really took off in the same way and in fact many younger people may not even be familiar with it.

The story of Facebook is quite well-known amongst many partly due to the film made about its founder Mark Zuckerburg, called 'The Social Network' produced in 2010.

Zuckerburg was born in 1984 in New York and showed talent as a young boy for computer programming and was encouraged by his father in this field.

He started studying in the world-famous Harvard University in 2002.

It was 2 years later that he started Facebook whose official date of beginning is 4th February 2004. It was originally intended to be only used for Harvard students but then spread to other universities. It kept on growing and in 2010 it reached an amount of 500 million members, a staggering amount. When you consider that this number of 500 million or 0.5 billion would mean if Facebook users were a country they would have been the 3rd largest country in the country. There were more Facebook users than people lived in the United States of America.

Facebook has grown and grown but some believe that it has passed its peak and no longer has the prestige or glamour especially amongst the youth that it had in the past. It's no longer seen as 'cool' and 'trendy' by some. However it is still absolutely massive in terms of both its membership and usage, with there being a huge amount of members, Facebook groups and pages which allow you to do a vast array of activities from buying products, to interacting with people from different parts of the world to learning about different topics.

Despite that it has been involved in controversy and there are concerns about Facebook and the data it has on its members. There have been other controversies too.  In fact Mark Zuckerburg has even had to go to Congress, the parliament in America, to answer questions. However advertisers are still using Facebook a lot and so helping it to make lots of money.

What does the future hold for Facebook? What is your opinion?