Facebook

Hi! Welcome to another post, in this case we will share a brief post about one of the most know and used site in the Internet, the blue network, Facebook.

What's Facebook?

Facebook is a worldwide known social network that fullfils the basic definition of a social network, defined in another post. Facebook helps to connect people and share information with friends, family and more. Being such a huge site, we would think a big enterprise created it, but it came from the hands and minds of some college students in 2004. The most recognised creator is Mark Zuckerberg, who has become a close-mind person in the sense of not willing to talk about his creation.

Some history will help you to understand how everything has lead the way from being a small site for college students in which you can share information to that place in which almost everyone can be found, and there are pages and forums for everything.

2006 - 2008: The close network your neighbour has created

Hard to fin but not impossible, along 2006 Mark Zuckerberg used to post some idealistic messages, full of positivism, admiting errors. This early era has been left behind, under lays and lays of modifications, updates and changes. The boom became when in 2006, News Feed was launched and even if it had a non positive welcoming (people complained about privacy and so), little by little users started posting and reading. Mark used to calm down by assuring that the main goal of his invention was, precissely, share your information.

Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them….. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do—your friends. (September 5th - 2006)

Zuckerberg and Facebook users set up the base of the blue social site, which will be changing with the new products and features brought in the future.

2009 - 2011: Share and receive

At this point in time, Facebook’s rhetoric has firmly solidified around one central cause: getting users to share their lives on the site, in any and every way. As far as Zuckerberg is concerned, sharing is connection, and the more information people put up on Facebook for their friends and families, the better everyone’s lives will be.

Zuckerberg talks a lot about his goal of making the world “more open” during this time period, part of the idea being that society has entered a new, post-privacy era where information should be put out in the open for everyone, not hoarded away.

The creator deducts that giving more privacy terms will lead users to share more, meaning the world would be more connected.

When I started Facebook from my dorm room in 2004, the idea that my roommates and I talked about all the time was a world that was more open. We believed that people being able to share the information they wanted and having access to the information they wanted is just a better world: People can connect better with the people around them, understand more of what’s going on with the people around them, and understand more in general. Also, openness fundamentally affects a lot of the core institutions in society - (June 29th - 2009)

2012 - 2016: On the cusp

Facebook becomes a public network and starts growing, it's unstoppable. As the site is in constant change so does their philosophy; they were fullfiling their dream, change the world. The company rolled out ambitious zero-rating projects, delivering connectivity from satellites or solar-powered drones, with no concern for cost. To hear Zuckerberg tell it, apps and websites were just instruments in a broader mission to connect humanity, a mission every bit as ambitious as Google’s goal to organize all the information in the world.

Now, the company (and Zuckerberg) have shareholders and a bottom line that needs to come first in the company’s mental calculus for rolling out new features and products. The end of this era also sees Zuckerberg’s futurist period, where he would focus intensely on AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) as the future of the internet. It’s a natural progression here: Facebook has been important on text, photo, and video sharing. Why not also be a critical player in whatever comes next?

2017 - present: Our apologies.

At the end of 2016, in the special election with Donald Trump, the privacy label becomes key for Facebook. The cracks in the base of Facebook are clear.

Facebook's hell of 2018 was even worse, cloaked in the shadow of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which dragged the company's name into a quagmire, and Zuckerberg testified before government agencies. The modern age of Facebook is obviously a constant journey of apologies, first against the state of the entire platform, and secondly against the abuse of power that bad actors can use.

With this in mind, it's no wonder that Zuckerberg is more closed-minded and withdraws from the company's new methods and directions.

Facebook now has a new mission. The goal is no longer to make "the world more open and connected", which is the basic goal of sharing. Instead, the company's goal is to empower people to build communities and develop further. After years of uncontrolled expansion, Facebook has essentially gotten too big. The feed is a bunch of insubstantial viral content, often toxic or downright fake, and its negative impact on businesses and their users is more than obvious.

After as many years of construction as possible, Facebook has entered a new era of building these smaller and more intimate communities again.

How to use Facebook? What for?

Now we have a great base about Facebook, we also know its objective is clear: share to your community the information you want them to know, and receive from them the information they want to share with you.

Facebook has a wide range of uses, and even if most of users are people who like content and post philosophic quotes, you can give it another view, like opening a page for your work place, create an event, offer your qualities and look for a job, buy and sell things, enter to forums or private groups in which you can talk about how much you love cats. So the answer to the "What for?" starts by what YOU want to do there.

When you look up for Facebook on Google, it will appear the first result in which says "Facebook - Log In or Sign Up". If you are new around there, you will need to Sign Up, which is an easy process you'd had probably done before. After you Sign Up, Facebook welcomes you with some positive messages in which they talk what you need to do in order to be visible in the site. Some examples are uploading a profile photo, write in your bibliography, show others what do you like or where you have studied or work as. After Facebook has gathered enough information about you, they show you thing you probably like or people you know. You can post whatever you want in your profile, share posts from other people, comment in a cute video or chat with your recently added friends.

As an example, here is how you can post on Facebook:

1. Click were you can read "What's on your mind, Cep?".

2. A small window will open, in which you can introduce text, and add photos, tag friends, talk about your feelings or the activity you are currently doing, where are you, and more.

3. Once you have everything you want to share, click on "Post". You can see now your post, the likes and comments it gets, answer to the comments, etc.

Feel free of investigating the numerous possibilities Facebook offers to you.

My page? Other apps?

Most of people has at least one profile in each social network, and if you want to be more connected, you can link them. You can't link the profile itself but you can create a page, which means you can show there what you want. For example, you can have your private profile but create a page for your bussiness, so you are the one who manages the page. If you have a Twitter profile for your bussiness, you'll be able to link them, and everyone who enters in your page will see the Twitter bird and next to it your Twitter account. Since Facebook and Twitter are owned by the same company, the link will be authomatic.

Here I show you how to create a page and where you can link your Facebook page and Twitter profile:

1. Once you are in your home page (clicking at the "home emoticon"), you will see on your left a column of thing you can do in Facebook, and by guiding there the mouse, you will scroll down until you see the word "Pages" and click in it.

2. You will be redirected to a panel similar to this one below. Now you will click on "+ Create New Page".

3. You will now see the prototype of page Facebook offers, along with some features of it, like the Page name, description, what are you going to use it for...

4. When you complete these compulsory features, you will click on "Create Page" and it will suggest adding photos. Once you complete that, click there again and you will have your basic page. Facebook will offer you complete your page in 13 steps, and you can even promote it.

For linking your Page to Twitter, you will scroll down in your page until you find a rectangle which says "Edit Page Info" like the one below. Click there.

A small window will open, and you will go to "More". The window will change and you will scroll down until you find "Other Accounts". Here you can write the account name and select to what social site it belongs to. You can add more than one.

Finally, if you want to see how people see your page (it means without being able to edit), you have to bee on you page, and click where it says "View as visitor".

We hope you have enjoyed this article. We will further talk about Facebook events, since this will be used in our project!