The world’s largest social networking site Facebook was launched in the year 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg along with his college friends Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Initially, the membership of Facebook was only given to its Harvard University students, slowly the membership was made available to other college students in the U.S. Now the membership is open to anyone who is above 13 years old in the World.
Let’s see the top 10 facts about Facebook:
1. Facebook with 5299 employees as of June 2013, has a revenue of $5.1 billion as of 2012 with a net income of US$ 53 million.
2. Facebook with 1.15 billion active users across the world as of March 2013, is the 2nd highest traffic-generating site in the world after Google.
3. Headquartered at Menlo Park in California, Facebook based on its 2012 income of USD 5.1 Billion, joined the Fortune 500 list and is placed at 462 on the list which was published in May 2013.
4. Facebook ownership percentages as of 2012, are: Mark Zuckerberg: 28%, Accel Partners: 10%, Digital Sky Technologies: 10%, Dustin Moskovitz: 6%, Eduardo Saverin: 5%, Sean Parker: 4%, Peter Thiel: 3%, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners: between 1 to 2% each, Microsoft: 1.3%. The remaining 30% is owned by its employees, celebrities, and other investors.
5. Facebook, which has over 23 million users in India, opened its branch in Hyderabad in 2010 and named it ‘Facebook India Online Services Pvt Ltd’.
6. In 2011, Facebook unveiled its video calling services using Skype as its technology partner. It allows its users to talk one-to-one calling using a Skype Rest API.
7. The Facebook website was built using the PHP platform which is compiled with HipHop, a source code transformer built by Facebook engineers that turns PHP into C++.
8. As of January 2013, the countries with the most Facebook users are: United States – 168.8 million users, Brazil with 64.6 million members, India – 62.6 million, Indonesia – 51.4 million, Mexico with 40.2 million users.
9. Facebook users access the website most from mobiles too, there are more than 192 million Android users, over 147 million iPhone users, close to 48 million iPad users, and around 56 million messenger users, making it a total of 604 million mobile users.
10. Many other countries have tried to create similar Facebook-like social networking websites. The major competitors of Facebook are qzone(qq.com) and renren in China; Cyworld in South Korea; VK and Odnoklassniki in Russia, Draugiem. lv in Latvia; Cloob in Iran; Zing in Vietnam; mixi in Japan.
Facebook is the most popular website for youngsters in the world. Do you have a Facebook account?