FACEBOOK CITY

How To Add Media To Your Facebook Profile

2009-05-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

Facebook: How To Add Media To Your Facebook Profile

How To Add Media To Your Facebook Profile: VideoJug gives you a simple guide to using media on your Facebook profile, making it look better and helping you to reach your Facebook profile's full potential.

Step 1: Photos

Facebook allows you to store up to 60 photos in an album, but you can store as many photos as you want. These photos can be shared around you face book friends and added to their profiles as well. To create an album, first of all go to www.facebook.com and login. Next click on 'My photos' in your profile on the left hand side. On the page, select 'Create album'. Then enter a name for the album, such as 'Steve's summer holiday in Spain', a short description of the album, select who you would like them to be visible to then click 'Create album'. Now you'll be asked to download a small piece of software called Active X Control. This programme enables you to upload photos quickly and easily. So follow the onscreen instructions to install. The best tactic is to click 'yes' to any prompts that appear.
Once your album is created, you can start uploading photos. Click on the 'Add more photos' tab. You will be taken you a java application that allows you to search your computer's files for photos. You'll see boxes that contain thumbnails of the photos that you want uploaded. As you scroll over the photos, you can rotate them if you wish before you upload them. Once you have picked all the photos you want, align them how you wish. Then click 'upload'.

Facebook will now take you to the 'edit photos page'. Here you can leave captions underneath photos, and do something called 'Tagging'. This is when you 'tag' the people in the photo. Once you tag someone, they will be notified through their news feeds on their profile. Also if you tag someone in a photo, or they you, that photo will then appear in the photo section of your page under 'view more photos of me' underneath your profile picture in 'tagged by others'.
To tag someone, click on the person's face in the photo, select their name in the box that pops up. If their name does not appear in the box then you can enter it. If the person is not on Facebook, then once you tag them you can enter an email address. They will then receive an email saying they have been tagged on a photo, and they'll get a link to the photo. You can tag everyone in the photo if you like, even yourself. When you tag someone, that photo will appear in their profile. If you don't want it to, click 'remove' next to their name. Once you are happy, click 'done' at the bottom of the page.
When it comes to other people's photos, you can't tag them directly, but you can suggest tags for them. Simply click on the 'tag this photo' link and tag whoever you think needs tagging in the photo. The person who added that photo will then be able to confirm or deny your tagging. As soon as this is done, other users can see it.

Step 2 : Who can see my photos?

You are able to change the privacy options to dictate who can see your photos. You can have different settings for different albums. You can let:

1: Everyone see your photos - that is your friends and people on your networks. Also if you tag anyone in the album, the friends of the person you tagged will be able to see them.

2: Just your networks and friends - this means that anyone on your networks and anyone you're friends with can view this album.

3. Only your friends - This means that only your friends can see the album.

Step 3 : Sharing albums with people not on face book

Facebook provides public links that allow you to show anyone your albums. To do this, go to your album, go to the bottom of the page, and click on 'Public link'. Now sending this link to friends or posting it on a website will allow people to view it if they click on the link.

Step 4 : Posting a video link

Facebook allows you to post video links and share them. Go to your profile and click on 'Posted items' on the left hand side. Then find a video that you want to share on the internet. Then simply copy the URL address and paste it into the 'Post a link section', then click 'Post'. You can write a comment to go with the film. Once you are done click on 'post' to put it on your profile. When you view your profile, the video link will appear under your posted items.

3 Ways to Advertise on Facebook and Boost Your Business Branding & Revenue

2009-04-25T03:20:00.000-07:00

Facebook Advertising - 3 Ways to Advertise on Facebook and Boost Your Business Branding & Revenue

If you are not using Facebook to market your business, you are losing the opportunity to reach out to 175,000,000 active users. Today, Facebook is the most popular social networking site online. People spend a lot of time on Facebook to interact with friends, make friends, play games and join interest groups. When you are able to get your advertising message across to these people, you will see a surge in traffic to your website and probably an increase in sales or enquiries.

A question that many people will ask is that how a business can leverage Facebook to market its product or service? Now, let me share with you 3 ways to advertise your business on Facebook:

1. Facebook social ads.

This is the most straight-forward way to advertise your business on Facebook. With social ads, you can set up your ads to target people by interest, age group, gender, etc. This will make your ads more targeted and increase its click-through-rate (CTR). With higher CTR, you are getting more visitors to your website and increase the chance of getting more customers. You can also choose to place a picture in your ads, which I strongly recommend you to do it. An ad with a picture captures attention and encourages more clicks.

2. Groups and Pages.

You can create a group and page for your business on Facebook. Then get more people to join your group or become a fan of your page. For a group, you can use the Invite function to get your friends to join. But there is no invite function for a page. You need to either use social ads to advertise it or pass the direct URL of the page to your friends. Both groups and pages are great channels to gather more potential customers and build brand.

3. Worth of mouth marketing.

It is easier to sell to a friend than a stranger. With so many active users on Facebook, you should try to know more friends. Join groups that are related to your product and service, and socialize with the group members. Add them to your contact and get to know them personally. When they get to know your business and trust it, they will recommend your company to their friends.

Facebook is definitely an advertising channel that you absolutely must leverage on. Every day, there are new advertisers on Facebook and more companies are creating pages and groups for their products. So what are you waiting for?

Make free pictures for your Facebook Photos

2009-04-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

A really fun site; you can design your own gadgets/gizmos/graphics to place on your Facebook or to send to friends.

GlassGiant.com has been around since 2001. It started as a personal portfolio website and programming "scratch pad" for it's founder, Shawn Wilson. Since then, it has grown into a popular spot for MySpace and other blog widgets.

Make cool pictures starring you! Do it just for fun or share them on Facebook

Expressions Application. For Your Facebook

2009-04-12T03:27:00.000-07:00

Add Personality to Your Facebook Profiles

Expressions are similar to wallpaper for your Facebook profile. The Expressions application is added through Facebook and allows you to display eye catching designs (Expressions) on your profile that: express who you are, what you're feeling and the things you like. They also make your profile look cool, and they're FREE so start expressing yourself today!

Expressions is meant to be a way to decorate your Facebook profile though images that express who you are, what you're feeling and the things you like. In order to add one of these Expressions to your profile you will need to Install / add Expressions Application (This of course requires you to have a Facebook account)

Learn More about expressions here

Using Facebook as an Online Marketing Tool

2009-04-06T06:20:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered if what you know about marketing on Facebook is accurate? Consider the following paragraphs and compare what you know to the latest info on marketing on Facebook.

Social networking websites are becoming more and more popular each day. Websites like these are primarily used as a social utility that will enable people to connect with other people. With Facebook, you will be able to connect with friends, acquaintances, and with other people who you study and live with.

One social networking website that is very popular among many people today is Facebook. With Facebook, you will be able to get your very own profile page where you can upload an unlimited amount of photos, share videos, and also a place where you will let people viewing a little about you.

Although this is a great social networking site that will enable you to keep in touch with your friends and acquaintances as well as meet new people and make new friends, it is also a website that made a lot of internet marketers drool.

With over 62 million active subscribers and still continuing to grow, you know that this place is the place to market.

If you own a business and you are reaching for an 18 to 25 demographic to sell your products, you will see that Facebook will be able to provide you with your target customers. Most subscribers here are aged between 18 and 25, which is called the "tech-savvy youth audiences".

If your marketing on Facebook facts are out-of-date, how will that affect your actions and decisions? Make certain you don't let important marketing on Facebook information slip by you.

With Facebook, you will not only target your ads on specific regions and universities, but you will also be able to get your fair share of audience. Here, you will see that when you join, you will be able to readily use tools that can really help you advertise your products and services.

You can customize your profile in order to make it unique and attract your target audience and you can also post blogs and even syndicate your blog page using RSS. If you have video ads about your products or services, you can post it here on Facebook as well.

When you register with Facebook, you can also add friends. Try adding as much as you can and establish some relationship. If you already know someone who uses Facebook, add them and try to get them to promote the products or services you offer.

This is one great feature of Facebook. With it, you will be able to get people who are connected to your network to advertise for you. This way, you will see that you will be able to market your product more effectively by getting people in other network know about your products or services.

Another great tool that you can use in Facebook is the ability to let you add applications in your profile page. Here, you will be able to add games and other applications in your profile page, which can be great in attracting other people to visit your profile page.

As you can see, Facebook will be able to create a great potential in internet marketing. The website already has the numbers in terms of traffic, and it also has the tools necessary for you to market your products or services effectively.

It is just a matter of knowing how to use these tools and also know how to effectively market your products or services. By creating a great profile page in Facebook, you can be sure that you will be able to attract a lot of targeted traffic.

So now you know a little bit about marketing on facebook. Even if you don't know everything, you've done something worthwhile: you've expanded your knowledge.

The Best Facebook Applications

2009-04-06T06:08:00.000-07:00

Social networks are great places to make friends and to promote your services - be it an online or offline business. The strength of social networks rests on two pillars:

First, they are completely FREE to join and use. Second, their use is based on the most powerful engine of human behavior - EMOTIONS. Members have the chance to interact, chat, upload their own stuff like photos, videos, etc.

Social networks offer a lot of tools called applications to facilitate member interaction and activities. Members can also ad applications. This short article is focused on one of the largest social networks - Facebook with an estimated membership of more than 150 Million members worldwide.

There are thousands of Facebook applications available. Most of them are used for entertainment. Some of them are of a more practical type. It is really difficult to identify the most useful applications for your profile and your purpose. Luckily, some people have done most of the work for you. I have also searched through many of Facebook applications and selected the best ones for you. Add these programs to your profile to enhance your Facebook experience and have a better traffic with multiple friends. After all, this is your purpose - to get as many friends as possible! Then you can recommend whatever you want to these friends - your opinions, recommendations, professional service and even special business offers or affiliate programs.

Here they are - the applications chosen by me (sorry for the removed links as required here - you will have to find them on Facebook):

1.Texas Hold 'Em Poker

If you like watching the World Series of Poker, then you'll love this Texas Hold 'em Facebook application. You can create your own private table and play against your friends using play money of course.

2. iLike

Turn your Facebook profile into an iTunes hub. You can add music and music videos to share with your friends. If you're a musician, use iLike to promote your music and build a group of followers.

3. Premier Football

Soccer and Futbol fans will love this app. Create your own squad made up of your Facebook friends, assign field positions, and compete against other squads around facebook.

4. Booze Mail

Send your friends beer, liquor, or any type of drink over Facebook. Best of all, booze mail is 100% free, unlike most facebook gifts.

5. HotorNot

HotorNot created a Facebook application for guys to rate women and possibly meet up with each other if you make a connection.

6. Friends Finance

Start your own business along with your friends and earn virtual dollars by selling products and services.

7. Famous Quotes

Unleash your intellectual side and reward your friends with educational, thoughtful, and life-changing quotations from some of the world's greatest minds.

8. Simple Stock Quotes

Get live streaming stock quotes and monitor your investment portfolio while on Facebook.

9. Dope Wars

Web 2.0 version of renown calculator game "Dope Wars." Buy guns, cars, dope, and become a kingpin.

10. Super Slot Machines

Are you a gambling addict? Play the slot machines and win some virtual credits.

11.Books iRead

List your favorite novels and share them with your friends. Also, browse book reviews and create your very own book club.

12. Jobster

Post your resume online and find a job to make some cash. There are hundreds of quality employers just waiting to hire you.

Grow Your Business With Facebook

2009-04-06T05:46:00.000-07:00

If you're a business owner in Orange County, then you are in the middle of one of the largest concentrations of small to medium sized businesses in the country. That fact alone means that you have most likely experienced firsthand the benefit of networking. It also means that you are always looking for ways to build your business.

Your friends, family and business partners have gotten to know you and shared your story with their friends and over time your business has grown. Add to that the marketing and formal advertising you may be doing and you are where you are today because your business story has been told through these two channels.

Have you considered a company profile on Facebook? Facebook is an amazing combination of those marketing channels. It's first based on who you know and that's how your social network builds in Facebook. You find old friends from high school, college, camp, jobs, etc. They send you a friend request, you suggest people they may know, and before you know it you've got an online reunion of sorts.

If they are people currently in your life they know your current story. Now think of all the people that would happily greet and talk with you, but for some reason or other you've lost touch with over the years. These are people that you are willing to connect with but haven't kept up with the growth of your business or career. These are the people that need a place to read more about your business. These are future customers!

The Best Facebook Tool For Making New Friends

2009-04-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

You've joined Facebook. You've connected with a bunch of old friends from High School, College, old jobs, and more. Most of your family is on there too. So now what? How do you find and make new friends on Facebook?

In the old Facebook design, on the right side of the screen under applications was an icon and link to Groups. Unfortunately, in the new Facebook design, they must have assumed that everyone knew what the groups were because they've now reduced it to a small icon at the bottom of your screen.

But what you want to look for is a small icon in the "Applications" bar at the bottom of your screen that looks like two blue heads. Don't worry, when you hover over it, it will say "Groups".

When you click on Groups, it will show you what Groups your friends have joined, but you can also search for Groups as well. No matter what the topic, there are probably several groups that match what you're looking for.

When you search for groups, one of the keys is to look for the color yellow. Why? Because they highlight groups that have recent activity. New members, new wall posts, new discussion topics, etc. It doesn't do you much good to join a group with 4 members where no one is doing anything.

Click on the groups that look interesting to you, and you will see the activity of the group. Double check under "Group Type" that the group is an open group, where anyone can join. If it is, just go ahead and join the group!

The great thing about groups is they look and operate almost the same as a Friends page. There is a wall where you can post random short messages to everyone, but there is also a Discussion Board area to get into deeper conversations.

At first, simply browse around and see what people are talking about. Hopefully there is already some things happening there, and you may want to go ahead and make some posts. One of the easiest things to do is to introduce yourself on the Wall, and let people know that you're hoping to... (here's the key)... you're hoping to make new friends in there.

You want to encourage others to add you as a friend, and you just need to be up front and let people know that you're great with them adding you.

The biggest mistake that I see a lot of people make in Groups, is that they come in and they don't add anything of value, they just randomly spam the wall or the discussion board with an ad, and then leave.

You definitely want to be of value to the group. Answer people's questions, participate in the discussion boards, etc. What's great is that although there may be many members of a group, most people are content to just sit back and watch. That means that it's easier for you to become an influencer in the groups, and gain more respect and friends because of your active role.

So next time you're on Facebook, check out the Groups, which is simply the easiest and best tool for finding and making new friends!

John Child is a professional speaker, author and trainer. He has conducted Internet Marketing seminars around the country and other parts of the world for companies like Microsoft, Success Magazine, eBay, and many others. He is the author of books and training programs such as "Selling the Web", "Virtual Downlines", and "The Strategic Web".

His latest training specializes in teaching Network Marketing and MLM professionals how to use Social Networking to build their business online. You can learn more and read John's blog at http://www.mysocialnetworkmarketing.com

Getting Hot Girls Through Facebook

2009-04-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

It seems that a lot of men are already into Facebook. Perhaps you're wondering why many men spend a lot of time browsing through the website. Well, Facebook is staggering with hot girls. Hot girls use the network for meeting new friends and in communicating with their love ones. If you try to compare the women in Facebook and that of dating sites, the former has a lot of quality women.

Some men have problems when it comes to dealing with women. They can't get a favorable response because they are doing the wrong things. If you don't care about your profile or if you're too boring, this is the best time to make some improvements so that hot girls will come running at you.

Here's how you can get a date with hot girls:

1. Make your profile interesting. Forget about putting Warcraft and Linux as your hobbies or interests because hot girls don't like them. Make sure that you provide interesting hobbies or interests on your profile.
2. Post extraordinary pictures. Avoid posting pics of your abs because hot girls are not really interested in those things. You can post pictures with cool friends or pictures of extreme sports. Travel pictures are also interesting. Don't post pictures that show you're drunk and instead, post pictures together with nice-looking girls. This will show that you're also a gentleman and a social guy.
3. Put pictures of your friends but just a few of them. Putting too many pictures will not be realistic. Just select the pictures with your closest friends.
4. Don't overload your profile with personal information. Hot girls are not into info overload. You can skip some fields if you want. By limiting the information on your profile, you can attract the attention of hot girls because they want to know you better.

Getting hot girls is not as difficult as you think. With a bit if know how, you can make your profile hot and interesting. Just put only the essential information. You can also describe yourself a bit, tell your hobbies or interests, but always keep in mind that hot girls prefer men who are feedback-oriented. Be real and don't deceive women. Pictures can reveal too much about your personality so choose them well. The pictures should impart an exciting and interesting individual. Once you caught their attention, they will want to know you more. Set up your profile now or improve the one you have right now.

Facebook Scams Beware!

2009-04-06T03:05:00.000-07:00

Facebook is a highly popular social networking site. You can meet tons of people all around the world. Whether you are there to make friends, networking or dating it is the place to be besides MySpace. Just about anyone you know has a Facebook account, from your co-worker, family, friends and your children are logging in everyday. There are 3 billion messages pass through this site every single day. It is a great resource for business owners to market their business.

There are 150 million of users from all over the world on this site every single day and that's why you should be careful on who you communicate with. You cannot see who you are talking too, and you don't know if they are approaching you with the truth in email exchanges. This is a perfect and wide open opportunity for scammers to take advantage of you. These criminals can pose as your friend and scam you out of anything they want.

Here are some scams for you to watch out for when it comes to communicating with strangers on Facebook.

Friend in Distress- This is when a scammer posing as your friend emails you and tells you that they have been in some kind of accident and need your help. They will ask you to send them money. They will give you any kind of story for you to believe them so that you can send those funds. One key to this scam that does not fit is when they request that you send the money overseas. If you come in contact with someone that has sent you an email like this, and it just does not sound right. Call your friend to make sure you don't fall victim to this scam. The reason why they have your friend's info to contact you on Facebook is that they have hack into your friend's computer. Be careful!

Fishing Friend Scam- Is when you get an email sending you to another website to download software. When you download the software it releases viruses to your computer and allows the hacker to get into your computer and gather all of your information.

Viral Wall Past Scam- This is when you get an email and it's has a virus in it which allows the hacker to get all of you and your friend's info on your Facebook account and see everything you are typing when communicating with your contacts. These scammers can collect your bank account information and everything else.

So, when you are on Facebook beware of these suspicious emails. If you get an email from a friend and you have an unsettling feeling about it, remember contact your friend by phone to ensure that it was them that had contacted you.

How to Create Facebook Widget

2009-04-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

This video will show you how to create Facebook Widgets using Microsoft's Popfly application. This will require a Facebook account and a Windows Live account

For more detaill, click here

Behind Facebook’s Success

2009-04-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Published: April 1, 2009

Twitter and Facebook are, OMG, so last millennium.

Or so it seems as I look out through my window in the forested Indian village where I am living, one of those places that the future has yet to invade.

A row of modest houses faces me. All day long, as I write, their inhabitants talk. And I have discovered through their talk that the age-old sociability of the village — ambient sociability, one might call it — harbors a strange likeness to the social-networking culture we think to be so new.

They don’t do one-on-one conversation here. They broadcast. If you have something to say, yell. Bring water! Go to school! Why did you tell her that thing? The people do not limit their talk to their own homes. Their scolds and praise and commands are for the village.

Privacy means little. Their doors are scraps of fabric. People come and go; it is hard to say who owns which house. Committing adultery or defaulting on a loan would be social suicide: everyone would know. A bargain has been made: There is more to gain from being in the network than from anonymity.

They stand in a stream of soothingly mindless hubbub. They hear opinions even when they do not ask, receive advice they do not need, get a little love from everyone and a lot from no one. Village sociability is not about sharing feelings. It doesn’t dwell on you. It asks for little. It just buzzes.

And what do the Internet’s social networks offer if not this village buzz? You build networks wider than your circle of close friends, and immediately you, too, stand in Hubbub Creek.

One friend “has been caring for an indescribably adorable baby bunny,” your Facebook news bulletin tells you. Another is “leaving for 10 days of backpacking!” Another’s iPhone has survived a “swim.” Once they are in your network, you are compelled, as in the village, to know their business. It’s strangely nice.

This is not about deep bonding. For that, stick to e-mail, the phone and — remember it? — human interaction. Social networks offer only ambient love. They maintain not your 10 key relationships, but your hundred semi-key mini-relationships. They are not about understanding or soul-baring, but about being simply, ambiently present — about knowing as soon as a relationship has ended, as they do in a village, even if you never learn why.

Villages once blanketed the earth. Then towns congealed, then cities, and the West in particular urbanized intensively, adopting the city’s weaker, more anonymous links.

Material affluence grew. But it came at the price of increasing isolation: vast high rises, far-flung and atomized suburbs, long commutes, a withering civic life, families separated by the pursuit of careers, fraying marriages and, above all, what the late novelist David Foster Wallace called “a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.”

That does not mean villages are ideal. They are home to unpardonable cruelties. They pigeonhole; they stifle. Many of India’s villagers hunger for the urban life, boarding trains by the millions each year to get out.

But one senses that the West’s social-network devotees, born in Mr. Wallace’s lonely culture, are driving the opposite way. The world feels too anonymous, homogeneous, with no tribes or castes to cling to. It is a climbing wall in polished marble, without nooks for our feet.

And to socially network is to make a big world feel small, to belong as in our village pasts, to live in that gentle, loving buzz.

In India’s smaller settlements, shame governs. Umred, a heartland town of 50,000, functions on mutually assured destruction. If a woman is seen on a motorcycle with a man, she is toast: the witness will tell. In so doing, the witness effectively denies herself the same activity. People participate in this because it enforces shared norms, which give them identity.

In the West, a certain anonymity once prevailed, then was voluntarily surrendered. People now post drunken photographs of themselves, announce whereabouts, disclose activities that could return to haunt them. There are risks for employment. There are risks for relationships — “No, I was at a work dinner,” you say, before the party photographs are uploaded. There are risks for offending friends when you visit a city without telling them.

But we make the same bargain as villagers: that, in surrendering privacy, we gain community.

In Ludhiana, a northern town, honor culture runs deep. The sexes are carefully segregated; men rarely ask women out. Instead, a man might circle a woman’s block on foot. He and his friends might hang out in the quarter. Then, having registered a regular, ambient presence, he might graduate to calling her and meeting her. In India prospective mates generally cannot spring out of the blue, but must come with context, connections, a history.

This may sound medieval to a Western ear. But has social networking not brought Indian-style courtship to the West? If a Westerner met someone at a party 10 years ago, one had to ask for a number or risk losing touch. Today, people can be found the next morning on Facebook and “friended.” An ambient presence can slowly be registered, a virtual if not physical circling of the block. Then, as in Ludhiana, one can close in when risk has abated.

And when you friend someone you’ve just met, you can know, before venturing out on a date, the person’s age, religion, politics, education, job history. I thought Indians alone still did such reconnaissance. But now Facebook Casanovas are adopting the village ways, in which “bio-data” are shared first and kisses later.

The West has, in effect, retraced the life path of Ram Jatan Pal.

He began in a teeming Mumbai slum, much like a village, where doors were open, toilets were shared and gossip and opinions flowed swiftly through the gullies.

Then he moved up in the world; he got “development.” The government offered him an apartment with his own toilet. Which seemed like a good idea, until Mr. Pal went inside and shut a front door for the first time in his life.

“It’s like being caged in a poultry farm,” he complained.

Like Western beneficiaries of “development,” Mr. Pal felt there was something missing. There used to be friends everywhere, playing cards, eating, drifting among homes. Step outside, and you saw everyone you knew.

They were not your best friends. It was ambient. They were there.

It was enough.

What Mr. Pal misses, perhaps we also miss. We have tired of coming home, shutting the door and living in our own heads. So we soothe ourselves as best we can, with this cool, gushing stream of sweet networked nothings.

Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast?

2009-04-02T06:54:00.000-07:00

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By BRAD STONE
Published: March 28, 2009

WHEN Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.
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Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

The masters of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Chris Cox, preside over a five-year-old company that is nearing a milestone of 200 million users, double the number last August.
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Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Facebook has helped Karen Haber of Israel find family members. The Holocaust dispersed many of her relatives around the globe.
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Claus Drachmann, a teacher, left, “friended” Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark and asked him to speak to his special-needs class. Mr. Rasmussen did so last fall.

That staggering growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower — most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of hot new start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service, while managing the expectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its hype-carbonated valuation.

By any measure, Facebook’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.

All of this mojo puts Facebook on a par with other groundbreaking — and wildly popular — Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Facebook promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.

Unlike search engines, which ably track prominent Internet presences, Facebook reconnects regular folks with old friends and strengthens their bonds with new pals — even if the glue is nothing more than embarrassing old pictures or memories of their second-grade teacher.

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Facebook each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

Among the three dozen or so connections she has made on Facebook over the last year are a fifth cousin who is a clinical social worker in Woodstock, N.Y.; a fourth cousin running an eyeglasses store in Zurich; and another fifth cousin, living in Hong Kong selling diamonds. Now she shares memories, photographs and updates with them.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,” Ms. Haber says. “I’m using Facebook and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook has also become a vehicle for broad-based activism — like the people who organized on the site last year and mobilized 12 million people to march in protests around the globe against practices of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Discussing Facebook’s connective tissue, Mr. Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. Mr. Drachmann subsequently invited Mr. Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children; the prime minister obliged last fall.

Mr. Zuckerberg says the story illustrates Facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers. “This represents a generational shift in technology,” he says. “To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.”

As Facebook has matured, so has Mr. Zuckerberg. He has recently traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie and making visits to media outfits like “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” And he says Facebook’s most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information — photographs, news articles and status updates — zipping across its servers.

Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly. “Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,” he says. “It’s a cool milestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. But there is so much more to do.”

AS Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injured feelings of users like Liz Rabban.

Ms. Rabban, 40, a real estate agent and the mother of two from Livingston, N.J., joined the site in November 2007, quickly amassing 250 friends and spending hours on the site each day.

But these days, she spends less time on the site and posts caustic comments about Facebook’s new design, which turns a majority of every user’s home page into a long “stream” of recent, often trivial, Twitter-like updates from friends.

“The changes just feel very juvenile,” Ms. Rabban says. “It’s just not addressing the needs of my generation and my peers. In my circle, everyone is pretty devastated about it.”

Ms. Rabban is not alone. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout and Terms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing — not just information about themselves but what people are doing now — easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,” he says.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions.

“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Facebook’s quandary. “This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beacon advertising system in 2007, and again when Facebook introduced new service terms earlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over the content people uploaded to the site.

Facebook responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed.

But while Facebook is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.

Users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy and disseminate members’ content worldwide. But Facebook says it has to ignore those objections to protect itself against lawsuits from users who might blame the company if they later regret having shared some piece of information with their friends. (Other Web sites have similar stipulations.)

While Facebook addressed the feedback on its unpopular design changes last week — partly by saying it would give users more control over the stream of updates that appear on their pages — it also said members’ pages would soon become even busier and more dynamic, updating automatically instead of requiring users to refresh their browsers to see new posts.

That’s a change that may irk users like Ms. Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring.

“It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

PEOPLE, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms — or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook at almost 200 million members is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees.

Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” — the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity.

Facebook’s huge growth is creating inevitable collisions as the whole notion of “friend” takes on a highly elastic meaning. When the Philadelphia Eagles allowed the star safety Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update.

Mr. Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him. The team has since refused to reconsider the matter, despite Mr. Leone’s deep remorse and his star turn on countless radio talk shows across the country to discuss the situation.

“If you know your boss is online, or anyone close to your boss is online, don’t be making comments that can be detrimental to your employment,” Mr. Leone advises.

Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.

Other problems are trickier, especially among true friends and family members. How, for example, can Facebook remain a place for teenagers to share what they did on Saturday night when it is also the place where their parents are swapping investment tips with old friends?

In the six weeks since Rich Hall, a 52-year-old theater manager in Mount Carroll, Ill., joined Facebook, he has reconnected with more than 400 friends and acquaintances, including former high school friends, his auto mechanic and former buddies from his days as a stock car driver.

In the course of his new half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, Mr. Hall also “friended” the 60 high school students he is directing in a school play, so he could coordinate rehearsal times. That led some of them to deny his request because, as he says they told him, their parents “found it creepy.” Along the way, Mr. Hall also found photographs of his 19-year-old son on the site, drinking beer at a Friday night bonfire.

“He denied it and said he wasn’t there,” Mr. Hall says. “I said, ‘Let’s go to this page together and look at these photos.’ Of course he did it. There are no secrets anymore.”

Dwindling secrets, and prying eyes, are at the heart of the Facebook conundrum. While offering an efficient and far-reaching way for people to bond, the site has also eroded sometimes natural barriers.

“People usually spend a lot of time trying to be separate — parents and children are a good example,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who has studied social networks and now works in the research department of Microsoft, which has invested in Facebook. “You are already seeing young people sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I hanging out with my mother who is reminiscing with her high school mates?’ You are seeing some reticence with young people that wasn’t there two years ago.”

For their part, Facebook executives say they are less interested in being cool than in being a useful place where anyone can go to share elements of their lives.

“The people who started the company weren’t cool. I’m not cool,” Mr. Cox says. “If you look at the people who work here, it’s much more nerdy and curious than cool.

“Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone.”

MR. ZUCKERBERG hopes that being ubiquitous and useful translates to the bottom line.

Though Facebook is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose its earnings, various press and analysts’ estimates of its 2008 revenues span from $250 million to $400 million. That range may not be enough to cover the company’s escalating expenses, and it hardly justifies some of the atmospheric valuations that have been placed on the start-up, including the $15 billion that Microsoft assigned to the company when it invested in it in 2007.

Facebook’s financial challenges aren’t unique. Popular free e-mail services like Hotmail from Microsoft and Gmail from Google have little in the way of profits to show for their vast audiences, aside from a few text ads that people rarely click on. Instant messaging networks like Microsoft Messenger and AIM from American Online are similarly popular but have never been hyperprofitable, for the simple reason that people do not want intrusive ads inserted into personal conversations.

Facebook’s approach is to invite advertisers to join in the conversation. New “engagement” ads ask users to become fans of products and companies — sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person’s friends on the site.

A new kind of engagement ad, now being tested, will invite people to vote — “what’s your favorite color M&M?” for example — and brands will pay every time a Facebook member participates.

“We are trying to provide the antidote for the consumer rebellion against interruptive advertising,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and Mr. Zuckerberg’s business consigliere.

Ms. Sandberg, who ran Google’s highly successful advertising initiatives before leaving the search giant to join Facebook, said her company’s revenue was growing despite a brutal downturn that is hurting other kinds of online advertising. She also puts one rumor to rest, saying the company is not considering charging members for any aspect of its service.

“We’re pretty pleased with the overall trajectory,” she says. “Our conversations with big advertisers have broadened in scope and we also have more people asking about how they can work with us.”

Facebook recently introduced advertising tools to let companies focus on users based on the language they use on the site and their geographic location. So, for example, an advertiser can now tailor a message to the Latino community in Los Angeles or French speakers in Montreal.

Despite the gloom permeating much of the advertising world, and the formidable challenges facing the site, some advertisers say they glimpse the future in Facebook’s brand of interactive advertising.

“Our clients all want to see if they can make this work,” says Al Cadena, the interactive account director at Threshold Interactive in Los Angeles, which represents companies like Nestlé, Honda and Sony. “Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Facebook is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really for the whole world.”

Internet evangelists say that when a technology diffuses into society, as Facebook appears to be doing, it has achieved “critical mass.” The sheer presence of all their friends, family and colleagues on Facebook creates potent ties between users and the site — ties that are hard to break even when people want to break them.

Many who have tried to free themselves of their daily Facebook habit and leave the site, like Kerry Docherty, a student at Pepperdine University’s law school, speak of a powerful gravitational pull and an undercurrent of peer pressure that eventually brings them back.

“People gave me a hard time for leaving Facebook,” says Ms. Docherty, who quit at the end of 2007 but then rejoined six months later. “Everyone has a love-hate relationship with it. They wanted me to be wasting my time on it just like they were wasting their time on it.”

Facebook City

2009-04-02T06:47:00.001-07:00

Facebook, by some measurements the most popular social network with 175 million active users worldwide, is one of the fastest-growing and best-known sites on the Internet today.

The company, founded in 2004 by a Harvard sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg, began life catering first to Harvard students and then to all high school and college students. It has since evolved into a broadly popular online destination used by both teenagers and adults of all ages.

Like other social networks, the site allows its users to create a profile page and forge online links with friends and acquaintances. It has distinguished itself from rivals, partly by imposing a spartan design ethos and limiting how users can change the appearance of their profile pages. That has cut down on visual clutter and threats like spam, which plague rival social networks. In May 2007, Facebook unveiled an initiative called Facebook Platform, inviting third-party software makers to create programs for the service and to make money on advertising alongside them. The announcement stimulated the creation of hundreds of new features or "social applications" on Facebook , from games to new music and photo sharing tools, which had the effect of further turbo-charging activity on the site.

As a result, estimates of Facebook's valuation soared during the summer of 2007. In October, Microsoft outbid its archrival Google to invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, which valued the company at a startlingly rich $15 billion.

Facebook's rise has been marked by several controversies. Three other Harvard students maintain that they came up with the original idea and that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom they had hired to write code for the site, stole the idea and surreptitiously created a rival company. Facebook has denied the allegations; a lawsuit is pending.

Another Harvard classmate, Aaron Greenspan, asserts that he created the underlying architecture for both companies, but has declined to enter the legal fray .

In November 2007, Facebook again created a storm when it announced a new advertising system called Beacon, in which users' purchases or activities on some 40 partner sites were broadcast to their Facebook friends. Some users claimed that they were not adequately warned about the feature, and the political activist group MoveOn.org organized a protest group on Facebook, which attracted more than 70,000 members.

In December, Facebook capitulated to a key demand of the protesters by offering users an easy way to decline to take part in Beacon.

In February 2009, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.

After a wave of protests from its users, Facebook said that it would withdraw changes to its terms of service. Mr. Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s next revision of terms would reflect “a new approach” and would be “a substantial revision from where we are now.” — Brad Stone, Dec. 7, 2007; updated Feb. 18, 2009