ABSTRACT
Mark Zuckerberg put Harvard’s class directory online because he thought it might be interesting to have access to other students’ profiles. Other students were also interested in seeing a photograph and some basic facts about their classmates. In fact, so many students wanted to see others’ online profiles that within twenty-four hours of its birth, February 4, 2004, Thefacebook.com had between 1,200 and 1,500 registrants (Cassidy, 2006). Zuckerberg realized that millions of young people might want to present themselves to others and make friends in an online environment, so he opened the site to students from other campuses. A year later, the social networking website Facebook.com was the second-fastest growing major site on the Internet (Cassidy, 2006). Within four years of its birth, Facebook had 70 million members, and according to comScore Media Metrix, a company that tracks online traffic, Facebook was the fifth most trafficked website in the world. Today users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to interact with other people.
