Facebook

Facebook's Meteoric Rise

Mark Zuckerberg created a site called Facemash at Harvard in late 2003. In February 2004, it was rebranded as Facebook and was released to selected university communities. The early history of the site remains a contentious issue for Zuckerberg, as it is unclear how much the site was related to another project, the Harvard Connection. The Harvard Connection founders and Zuckerberg settled out of court. Nevertheless, the notoriety of Facebook's early years was the subject of a successful, semifictionalized Hollywood blockbuster, The Social Network.

Facebook was hardly the first social network site. Prior to Facebook, Six Degrees, MySpace, and Friendster all enjoyed substantial popularity. However, Facebook's simple aesthetic, perceived legitimacy, and capacity to scale led to very rapid growth, first among college campuses and then within the wider North American population. In September 2006, the site was available to anyone over 13 with a valid e-mail address.

The basic function of Facebook is to facilitate information sharing between individuals who have indicated that they are mutual friends. This information includes archival material, such as photos and blog posts, as well as real-time material (status updates and a chat window) and information about the future (such as events and birthdays). Because of the comprehensive functions available on this site, Facebook brands itself as a “social utility.” Nevertheless, scholars still tend to consider the site an example of a social network site. On a social network site, each person gets his or her own account and then can stipulate which other accounts they want [Page 284]to access. This is an example of what Barry Wellman had previously called “person-to-person” networking, where individuals connect directly to each other, often through personal electronic devices and accounts. This can be contrasted with place-to-place networking, where people associate through shared mutual contexts.

Who is a Friend?

Facebook, like many other social network sites, use the term friend to indicate a base relationship between two people. One of the most important and challenging insights to be learned from successful social network sites is that it is far better to underspecify than overspecify the meaning of a relation between two individuals. Thus, the term friend makes more sense than trying to a priori label every role relation and maintain these labels as the relationship grows. While the use of the term friend is sometimes seen as contentious, wherein people may be criticized for having many superficial friends, this is based on the notion that “friend” on an SNS is a direct analog to a friend in a personal network. By contrast, a friend on an SNS implies access control—to be a friend is to be a member of the set of people who have access to friends-only content.

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