Facebook is a corporation and an onlinesocial networking service headquartered inMenlo Park, California, in the United States. Its website was launched on February 4, 2004 byMark Zuckerberg with his Harvard Collegeroommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The founders had initially limited the website’s membership to Harvard students, but later expanded it to colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities and later to high school students. Since 2006, anyone in general aged 13 and older has been allowed to become a registered user of the website, though variations exist in the minimum age requirement, depending on applicable local laws. Its name comes from the face bookdirectories often given to American university students.
After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users asfriends, exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos, use various apps, and receive notifications when others update their profiles. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups organized by workplace, school, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists such as People From Work or Close Friends. Also, users can complain or block unpleasant people. Facebook had over 1.59 billion monthly active users as of August 2015. Because of the large volume of data that users submit to the service, Facebook has come under scrutiny for their privacy policies. Facebook, Inc. held its initial public offering in February 2012 and began selling stock to the public three months later, reaching an original peak market capitalization of$104 billion. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to reach a market cap of$250 billion.Following its Q3 earnings call in 2015, Facebook’s market cap exceeded$300 billion.