Facebook

TheFacebook.com was created in February of 2004 by 21 year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his two roommates, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. Facebook is the main rival to MySpace, the social networking site owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

"It is not easy capturing the attention of Jim Breyer, one of Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists. But Mark Zuckerberg, a 21-year-old Harvard student, managed to do it with a Web site that has attracted 2.8 million registered users on more than 800 campuses since it began in February 2004.

"Mr. Breyer was so taken with Mr. Zuckerberg's company, thefacebook.com, which creates online interactive college-student networks, that his firm, Accel Partners, plans to announce a $13 million investment in the start-up today...

"But events overtook them. Before heading west, Mr. Zuckerberg arranged a dinner with Sean Parker, the founder of Napster, to talk about his Web site, which had swept through Stanford University in a number of weeks. A few weeks later, the two bumped into each other on a street in Palo Alto, Calif. Before long, Mr. Parker, who is also a co-founder of Plaxo, an online service that updates e-mail address books, began informally advising the company. By the end of the summer he became president. He then introduced Mr. Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, the online payment service acquired by eBay in 2002.

"Mr. Thiel invested $500,000 as seed money, the first major infusion of cash into thefacebook.com, Mr. Zuckerberg said. More important, his connection gave it the imprimatur of an up-and-coming company. Soon, other investors came calling."

In 2009, Christian Fuchs published a critical review of their work in his paper "Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic Surveillance" (Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group).

Funding

• "Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004
• "Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005
• "Round three: $25 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company."

People

• Mark Zuckerberg - Founder and CEO
• Dustin Moskovitz - Co-founder and VP Engineering
• Owen Van Natta - COO
• Adam D'Angelo - CTO
• Mike Sheridan - CFO
• Matt Cohler - VP Strategy and Business Operations

Directors

• Members: Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Breyer (Accel Partners), and Peter Thiel
• Observer: David Sze (Greylock Partners)

Resources and articles

Related SourceWatch

• Fake Your Space [1]
• Netanel Jacobsson, head of international business development
• Joanna Shields - former MD

External links

• Harvey Jones & José Hiram Soltren, "Facebook: Threats to Privacy", Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005.
• Annon, "Big Brothers, Big Facebook: Your Orwellian Community", Blog Entry, 2005. (Useful critique which all appears to be correct - see links)
• Wikipedia
• Joshua Levy and..., "Did Facebook Play Favorites with Obama?" TechPresident.com, June 4, 2007.
• James Massola, "So what is Facebook, anyway?", New Matilda, July, 3, 2007.
• Matt Greenop, "Facebook - the CIA conspiracy", New Zealand Herald, August 8, 2007.
• George Roberts, "FaceBook, the intelligence community and right-wing PACs" rWorld, October 13, 2007.
• Tom Hodgkinson "With friends like these ..." The Guardian, January 14th 2008
• Catherine Rampell, "What Facebook Knows That You Don't", The Washington Post, February 23, 2008. A15.
• BBC, "Identity 'at risk' on Facebook", BBC, May 1, 2008.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center, "Facebook Privacy", EPIC, 2008.
• Claire Hoffman, "The Battle For Facebook", Rolling Stone, June 26, 2008.
• Mikita Brottman, "The Healing Powers of Facebook: The Psychology of the Self and the Public Realm", Counterpunch, January 11, 2010.
• Al Giordano, "Facebook, Privacy, and The New Exhibitionism", Narconews, May 12, 2010.
• Christian Fuchs, 2011. An alternative view of privacy on Facebook. Information 2 (1): 140-165. [special issue on “Trust and privacy in our networked world“, edited by Dieter M. Arnold and Herman T. Tavani.
• Fuchs, Christian. 2011. The political economy of privacy on Facebook. Vienna: Unified Theory of Information Research Group. The Internet & Surveillance Research Paper No.9.
• Damien Pearse, "Facebook's 'dark side': study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism", guardian.co.uk, 17 March 2012.