Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was Facebook created?
Facebook is a social networking service launched in July 2003, as FaceMash, later changing to TheFacebook on February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommate and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. 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 gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 and older.
FaceMash, Facebook's predecessor, opened in 2003. Developed by Mark Zuckerberg, he wrote the software for the Facemash website when he was in his second year of college. The website was set up as a type of "hot or not" game for Harvard students. The website allowed visitors to compare two female student pictures side-by-side and let them decide who was hot or not.
The client was created by WhatsApp Inc., based in Mountain View, California, which was acquired by Facebook in February 2014 for approximately US$19.3 billion. By February 2018, WhatsApp had a user base of over one and a half billion, making it the most popular messaging application at the time. WhatsApp has grown in multiple countries, including Brazil, India, and large parts of Europe, including the United Kingdom and France.
Beacon created considerable controversy soon after it was launched, due to privacy concerns. On November 20, 2007, civic action group MoveOn.org created a Facebook group and online petition demanding that Facebook not publish their activity from other websites without explicit permission from the user. In fewer than ten days, this group gained 50,000 members. After the class-action lawsuit, "Lane v. Facebook, Inc.", Beacon was changed to require that any actions transmitted to the website would have to be approved by the Facebook user before being published. On November 29, 2007, Stefan Berteau, a security researcher for Computer Associates, published a note on his tests of the Beacon system. He found that data was still being collected and sent to Facebook despite users' opt-outs and not being logged into Facebook at the time. This revelation was in direct contradiction to the statements made by Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of marketing and operations, in an interview with "The New York Times" published the same day:
On May 19, 2010, Lahore High Court ordered Facebook to be blocked. Facebook was blocked until May 31 after a competition page encouraged users to post drawings of Muhammad. The controversial page named “Draw Muhammad Day” had been created by a Facebook user in response to American cartoonist Molly Noris’s protest to the decision of US television channel, Comedy Central to cancel an episode of the popular show “South Park” over its depiction of Mohammed. Noris had however disavowed having declared May 20 “Draw Muhammad Day” and had condemned the effort and issued an apology. The ban, implemented by the PTA, also resulted in a ban on YouTube and restricted access to other websites, including Wikipedia.
GitHub was developed by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon using Ruby on Rails, and started in February 2008. The company, GitHub, Inc., has existed since 2007 and is located in San Francisco.
Brian Acton (born February 17, 1972) is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder (with Jan Koum) of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application which was acquired by Facebook Inc. in February 2014 for US$19 billion. He was formerly employed at Yahoo Inc. In September 2017, Acton announced that he was leaving WhatsApp to start a foundation. On February 21, 2018, Acton and Moxie Marlinspike announced the formation of the Signal Foundation.
WhatsApp was founded by Jan Koum and Brian Acton.WhatsApp joined Facebook in 2014, but continues to operate as a separate app with a laser focus on building a messaging service that works fast and reliably anywhere in the world.WhatsApp started as an alternative to SMS. Whatsapp now supports sending and receiving a variety of media including text, photos, videos, documents, and location, as well as voice calls. Whatsapp messages and calls are secured with end-to-end encryption, meaning that no third party including WhatsApp can read or listen to them. Whatsapp has a customer base of 1 billion people in over 180 countries. It is used to send personalised promotional messages to individual customers. It has plenty of advantages over SMS that includes ability to track how Message Broadcast Performs using blue tick option in Whatsapp. It allows sending messages to Do Not Disturb(DND) customers. Whatsapp is also used to send a series of bulk messages to their targeted customers using broadcast option. Companies started using this to a large extent because it is a cost effective promotional option and quick to spread a message. Still, Whatsapp doesn't allow businesses to place ads in their app.
Other high-tech companies with operations in Austin include 3M, Apple, Amazon, AMD, Apartment Ratings, Applied Materials, ARM Holdings, Bigcommerce, BioWare, Blizzard Entertainment, Buffalo Technology, Cirrus Logic, Cisco Systems, Dropbox, eBay, PayPal, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hoover's, HomeAway, Hostgator, Intel Corporation, National Instruments, Nvidia, Oracle, Polycom, Qualcomm, Inc., Rackspace, RetailMeNot, Rooster Teeth, Samsung Group, Silicon Laboratories, Spansion, United Devices, and Xerox. In 2010, Facebook accepted a grant to build a downtown office that could bring as many as 200 jobs to the city. The proliferation of technology companies has led to the region's nickname, "Silicon Hills", and spurred development that greatly expanded the city.
The World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, which had been available only to government and universities. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina introduced Mosaic, the first web browser capable of displaying inline images and the basis for later browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Stanford Federal Credit Union was the first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994.. In 1996 OP Financial Group, also a cooperative bank, became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. The Internet expanded quickly, and by 1996, it was part of mass culture and many businesses listed websites in their ads. By 1999 almost every country had a connection, and nearly half of Americans and people in several other countries used the Internet on a regular basis. However throughout the 1990s, "getting online" entailed complicated configuration, and dial-up was the only connection type affordable by individual users; the present day mass Internet culture was not possible.
Friendster is one of the first social networking websites in the World Wide Web when it was introduced in 2002. However, its popularity in the United States plummeted quickly in 2004 due to massive technical problems and server delays. But as it was losing its American audience, Friendster slowly gained users from Southeast Asia starting in the Philippines. Friendster director of engineering Chris Lunt wondered why its web traffic was spiking in the middle of the night, and noticed that the traffic was coming from the Philippines. He then traced the trail to a Filipino-American marketing consultant and hypnotist named Carmen Leilani de Jesus as the first user to have introduced Friendster to the Philippines, where a number of her friends live.
Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail (later Yahoo! Mail). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL"). The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products, using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.
The World Wide Web, also known as the WWW and the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.
In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web to meet the demand for simple and immediate information-sharing among physicists working at CERN and different universities or institutes all over the world.
Microsoft Office is a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketing term for an office suite (bundled set of productivity applications), the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration and Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand. On July 10, 2012, Softpedia reported that Office is used by over a billion people worldwide.
Support for HTML5 video has been steadily increasing. In June 2013, Netflix added support for HTML5 video. In January 2015, YouTube switched to using HTML5 video instead of Flash by default. In December 2015, Facebook switched from Flash to HTML5 for all video content.
Development of the GitHub platform began on October 19, 2007. The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett and Scott Chacon after it had been made available for a few months prior as a beta release.
Web navigation came about with the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1989 when Timothy Berners-Lee invented it. Once the world wide web was available, web navigation increasingly became a major aspect and role in jobs and everyday lives. With one-third of the world’s population now using the internet, web navigation maintains a global use in today's ever evolving international society. Web navigation is not restricted to just computers, either, as mobile phones and tablets have added avenues for access to the ever-growing information on the web today. The most recent wave of technology which has affected web navigation is the introduction and growth of the smartphone. As of January 2014, 58% of American adults owned a smart phone, and that number is on the rise from previous years. Web navigation has evolved from a restricted action, to something that many people across the world now do on a daily basis.
It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get started with your own website. In a list of 80 cultural moments that shaped the world, chosen by a panel of 25 eminent scientists, academics, writers, and world leaders, the invention of the World Wide Web was ranked number one, with the entry stating, "The fastest growing communications medium of all time, the internet has changed the shape of modern life forever. We can connect with each other instantly, all over the world".
In January 2009, after purchasing an iPhone and realizing the potential of the app industry on the App Store, Koum started visiting his friend Alex Fishman in West San Jose where the three would discuss "... having statuses next to individual names of the people", but this was not possible without an iPhone developer. Fishman found a Russian developer on RentACoder.com, Igor Solomennikov, and introduced him to Koum. Koum named the app "WhatsApp" to sound like "what's up". On February 24, 2009, he incorporated WhatsApp Inc. in California. However, because early versions of WhatsApp often crashed or got stuck at a particular point, Koum felt like giving up and looking for a new job, upon which Acton encouraged him to wait for a "few more months".
Yahoo grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. Yahoo went public in April 1996 and its stock price rose by 600 percent within two years. Like many search engines and web directories, Yahoo added a web portal, putting it in competition with services like Excite, Lycos and America Online. By 1998, Yahoo was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Yahoo Directory the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day which was triple the number compared to rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Yahoo began offering free e-mail from October 1997 after the acquisition of RocketMail, which was then renamed to Yahoo! Mail. In 1998, Yahoo! decided to replace AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Directory with Inktomi. Yahoo's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999 - that of Geocities for $3.6 billion, and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion.
As the Web grew, search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler, only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos, was created in 1993 as a university project, and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular—Yahoo! (founded 1994) and Altavista (founded 1995) were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.
Mark Zuckerberg served as a field organizer for Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. Zuckerberg was responsible for Get out the vote and mobilization efforts. Facebook was launched the same year. The Facebook Platform relies on group formation and constant communication, both of which are goals for any political campaign.
Chris Hughes, a founding member and developer at Facebook, left the company to work as an advisor for President Barack Obama. While working at Facebook, Hughes designed a Facebook profile for the then presidential candidate. Following his departure, Hughes worked on Obama’s Facebook page and utilized his knowledge of content management and new developments to outpace other candidates in relation to their online presence. Hughes created the website MyBarak0bama.com which had a similar layout and concept as Facebook.
Facebook is an online communication tool that allows individuals to interact with each other within a virtual community. It has become the most popular social networking site since its beginnings in 2004. Facebook was co-founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with his roommates and colleagues from Harvard University. Zuckerberg is presently the CEO of Facebook. This online communication tool can be used for personal and for professional purposes. Technology plays an integral part of students' daily lives and teachers will need to find ways of implementing these technologies into their classrooms. Research is currently being conducted on the benefits of implementing Facebook in educational settings and how it could potentially be used as a tool for teaching and learning, even if it is known for social networking in the first place. For example, Facebook can be used to create discussion groups for group projects to divide the work and stay up to date with each other. It can also be used to share articles. Educators can also create professional Facebook accounts for their classrooms, which could be potentially used as a dashboard to upload course material and assignments. It can also be used to create polls to get some feedback and suggestions on the course that the teacher would like to implement. The objective is to improve the methods of teaching as well as the learning experience of students. With the use of technologies, students are more engaged in their learning.
Facebook launched the Facebook Platform on May 24, 2007, providing a framework for software developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. A markup language called Facebook Markup Language was introduced simultaneously; it is used to customize the "look and feel" of applications that developers create. Using the Platform, Facebook launched several new applications, including Gifts, allowing users to send virtual gifts to each other, Marketplace, allowing users to post free classified ads, Facebook events, giving users a method of informing their friends about upcoming events, Video, letting users share homemade videos with one another, and social network game, where users can use their connections to friends to help them advance in games they are playing. Many of the popular early social network games would combine capabilities. For instance, one of the early games to reach the top application spot, (Lil) Green Patch, combined virtual Gifts with Event notifications to friends and contributions to charities through Causes.
Businesses eventually realized that social networking websites could provide a fast and efficient way of marketing. Social media websites are great places for businesses to reach their customers, and the environment can provide a means for growing a business. 
In 2005, as social networking websites were becoming more and more popular, Myspace had more page views than Google. Myspace was followed by Facebook which started in February 2004.
When Facebook began, users were limited to college students in the United States, who had to use a college email with a .edu extension to join the network. In September 2005 some high schools were allowed to join the network, but they needed an invitation to join. On September 26 of 2006, Facebook announced that anyone around the world older than 13 years old with a valid email would be able to join 
Facebook’s online community. 
In October 2007, Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook. That gave them the right to place international ads on Facebook. In July 2010 it was reported that Facebook had more than 500 million active users. This means that one out of fourteen people around the world is a Facebook user. 
The growth of Facebook was a boom in the social networking space. Facebook became a huge corporation that had 1400 employees in 2009; their estimated revenue was US$800 million in 2009. In 2010, it was reported that there were more than 200 social networking websites on the web.