According to Wikipedia a social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called "nodes", which are tied

(connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. A social network service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.1As of July 2010 Facebook has more than 500 million active users,2 Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Facebook has been met with controversies. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Iran, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Syria andBangladesh on different basis. For example on the basis of Anti-Islamic and religious discrimination content allowed by Facebook, it was banned in many countries of the world. It has also been banned at many workplaces to prevent the wasting of employees' time.
1

"Social Nets Engage in Global Struggle" - 66% of MySpace and Facebook users come from North America: Adweek website. Retrieved on January 15, 2008.
2

Hi5 popular in Europe: article from the PBS MediaShift website. Retrieved on January 18, 2008

The privacy of Facebook users has also been an issue, and the safety of user accounts has been compromised several times. Facebook has settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property. Facebook, which only a couple of days ago was valued at $50bn has now reached 600 million users worldwide. In fact this website is now so popular that some people are saying ridiculous things about it. Technology Blogger Paul Thurrott recently said on his podcast Im tired of Luddites and hold-outs. You need to be on Facebook, now. If youre not, you do not exist. Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and a chat feature. They can also create and join interest groups and "like pages" (formerly called "fan pages", until April 19, 2010), some of which are maintained by organizations as a means of advertising.3 To allay concerns about privacy, Facebook enables users to choose their own privacy settings and choose who can see specific parts of their profile.4 The website is free to users, and generates revenue from advertising, such as banner ads.Facebook requires a users name and profile picture (if applicable) to be accessible by everyone. Users can control who sees other information they have shared, as well as who can find them in searches, through their privacy settings.5 Facebook has built-in privacy settings. These are designed to help you protect personal information and your account itself from crooks that are up to no good. However, the problem is that Facebook is still growing, and often new features come at the cost of security. Most Facebook users are aware of the basic privacy protections, but do not know how to manage the more advanced features. The recent privacy changes have only compounded the issue. Facebook has a decent help section, which explains many aspects to the privacy and security features. However, in some respects they are not overly detailed, which could be because Facebook feels that overloading a user with too much information can be a bad thing. If so, they would be correct. However, sometimes more information is better than partial information. The reason proper privacy management is important is because of the information that is shared on Facebook daily by its users. Personal details are written about without a second thought. Yet, those same details, when pieced together over time, can lead to an entire dossier on a person. Remember, if you post it online, it will stay there. So the note or update you wrote two or more years ago on Facebook can be used down the line for something completely unexpected.

Facebook Privacy is Your Responsibility

3

"Edit Your Profile". Facebook. Archived from the original on February 27, 2008. Retrieved March 7, 2008. 4 "Search Privacy". Facebook. Retrieved June 13, 2009. 5 "Choose Your Privacy Settings". Facebook. Retrieved September 10, 2009.

You are choosing to upload each photo, each tweet, each message, and in the reality of the web is that security is not absolute. Facebook also has systems to detect the fake profiles the group uses to seed attacks. Still, researchers recently identified more than 20,000 fake accounts, which they reported to Facebook as part of the takedown effort. The profiles tend to include pictures of attractive women, and some accumulated as many as a thousand friends, even though Facebook warns users not to befriend strangers on the site. Facebook developers have created roadblocks that can help halt the attacks. For instance, if Facebook detects malicious activity and suspects a users PC has become infected, it will temporarily suspend the account and require that the user run a free McAfee antivirus scan and remove infections. Today, Facebook has become one of the most popular online social networking websites, making it a veritable untapped network for traffic and business. People spend a great amount of time online on the Facebook website looking to make new friends, interact with people, play games and interact within interest groups. An effective way of promoting businesses is advertising on Facebook because of the big number of active users witch offer their personal information in order to get what they need. There are 3 ways of promoting through Facebook: 1 Social Ads on Facebook This is one of the most straight forward ways that you can promot on Facebook. The social ads are targeting people based on a number of different functions including age group, gender and interest for example. This will give the website more visitors and also an increase in the number of customers. Throw a picture up in your ad and capture more attention to attract more clicks as well. 2 Groups and Pages on Facebook You can create groups and pages for your business, company or website on Facebook, and then you can get people to become a fan of your page or to join your group. Use the invite function for groups to get all of your friends to join, or tell your friends about your page so that they can become a fan. Both pages and groups are two excellent channels that you can use to gather more potential customers as well as to build more brand awareness on Facebook. 3 Facebook Word of Mouth Selling to a friend is always going to be easier than selling the same thing to a stranger. You should try to get to know more friends simply because there are so many active users on the Facebook site. Join groups with some kind of relation to your product or your business and socialize with the members of those groups to make new friends and acquaintances. When people get to know your business and begin to really trust it, they will be much more likely to buy from you.

In protecting its users, Facebook offers you a guideline of advertising in order to approve your ads. Facebook ads get approved by employees, it generally takes between 1-6 hours to get an ad approved. The advertising opportunities are (relatively) limited, compared to traditional sites, but this pushes marketers to be more inventive it forces us to think about how we can make our brands fit into the things that people are already doing on the site. Rather than just advertising (though that is an important element), we should be looking to provide entertainment, or dialogue, or adding utility.