Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard; he also co-founded Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He is an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.
Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American technology executive, philanthropist, and writer. Sandberg served as chief operating officer (COO) of Meta Platforms, a position from which she stepped down in August 2022. She is also the founder of LeanIn.Org. In 2008, she was made COO at Facebook, becoming the company's second-highest-ranking official. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's board of directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg was credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Before that, Sandberg served as research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank, and subsequently as his chief of staff when he was Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury.
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder. Zuckerberg has been the subject of multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues such as user privacy.
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities. Since 2006, Facebook allows everyone to register from 13 years old, except in the case of a handful of nations, where the age limit is 14 years. As of December 2022, Facebook claimed almost 3 billion monthly active users. As of October 2023, Facebook ranked as the third-most-visited website in the world, with 22.56% of its traffic coming from the United States. It was the most downloaded mobile app of the 2010s.
Facebook has been the subject of criticism and legal action since it was founded in 2004. Criticisms include the outsize influence Facebook has on the lives and health of its users and employees, as well as Facebook's influence on the way media, specifically news, is reported and distributed. Notable issues include Internet privacy, such as use of a widespread "like" button on third-party websites tracking users, possible indefinite records of user information, automatic facial recognition software, and its role in the workplace, including employer-employee account disclosure. The use of Facebook can have negative psychological and physiological effects that include feelings of sexual jealousy, stress, lack of attention, and social media addiction that in some cases is comparable to drug addiction.
Beacon formed part of Facebook's advertisement system that sent data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements and allowing users to share their activities with their friends. Beacon reported to Facebook on Facebook's members' activities on third-party sites that also participated with Beacon. These activities were published in users' News Feed. This occurred even when users were not connected to Facebook, and happened without the knowledge of the Facebook user. The service was controversial and became the target of a class-action lawsuit, resulting in it shutting down in September 2009. One of the main concerns was that Beacon did not give the user the option to block the information from being sent to Facebook. Beacon was launched on November 6, 2007, with 44 partner websites. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, characterized Beacon on the Facebook Blog in November 2011 as a "mistake." Although Beacon was unsuccessful, it did pave the way for Facebook Connect, which has become widely popular.
Christopher Poole, also known online as moot, is an American Internet entrepreneur and developer. He founded the anonymous English-language imageboard 4chan in October 2003, when he was still a teenager; he served as the site's head administrator until January 2015. He also founded the online community Canvas, active from 2011 to 2014. Poole was hired by Google in 2016 to work on the Google+ social network and as a product manager. He left the company in 2021.
The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. It portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, with Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Max Minghella as Divya Narendra. Neither Zuckerberg nor any other Facebook staff were involved with the project, although Saverin was a consultant for Mezrich's book.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as Facemash in 2003. It became TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. Facebook was rebranded to Meta on October 28, 2021 during the Connect 2021.
Irina Slutsky is an American journalist, vlogger, and early pioneer in web series.
Marcus Anthony Lovingood is an American new media producer, political activist, internet entrepreneur, and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council in the 14th District. In 2012, Lovingood appeared on Bravo's 'Start-Ups: Silicon Valley and is also known for his work on the 2012 United States presidential election of President Barack Obama by founding the Pride PAC, the first LGBT-based Super Political Action Committee.
The like button on the social networking website Facebook was first enabled on February 9, 2009. The like button enables users to easily interact with status updates, comments, photos and videos, links shared by friends, and advertisements. Once clicked by a user, the designated content appears in the News Feeds of that user's friends, and the button also displays the number of other users who have liked the content, including a full or partial list of those users. The like button was extended to comments in June 2010. After extensive testing and years of questions from the public about whether it had an intention to incorporate a "Dislike" button, Facebook officially rolled out "Reactions" to users worldwide on February 24, 2016, letting users long-press on the like button for an option to use one of five pre-defined emotions, including "Love", "Haha", "Wow", "Sad", or "Angry". Reactions were also extended to comments in May 2017, and had a major graphical overhaul in April 2019.
Priscilla Chan is an American pediatrician and philanthropist. She and her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, a co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in December 2015 with a pledge to transfer 99 percent of their Facebook shares, then valued at $45 billion. She attended Harvard University and received her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco.
The commercialization of the Internet encompasses the creation and management of online services principally for financial gain. It typically involves the increasing monetization of network services and consumer products mediated through the varied use of Internet technologies. Common forms of Internet commercialization include e-commerce, electronic money, and advanced marketing techniques including personalized and targeted advertising. The effects of the commercialization of the Internet are controversial, with benefits that simplify daily life and repercussions that challenge personal freedoms, including surveillance capitalism and data tracking. This began with the National Science Foundation funding supercomputing center and then universities being able to develop supercomputer sites for research and academic purposes.
Social media played an important role in shaping the course of events surrounding the 2016 United States presidential election. It facilitated greater voter interaction with the political climate; unlike traditional media, social media gave people the ability to create, comment on, and share content related to the election.
Dot. is an American-Canadian animated children's television series based on the book by Randi Zuckerberg. The series debuted on CBC Kids in Canada on September 6, 2016. The series later premiered on Universal Kids in the United States on October 22, 2016. It has also been shown on Tiny Pop in the UK since 2017.
In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising.
Laurie Segall is an American journalist. Noted for interviewing leaders in technology, including Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, among others, she was the senior technology correspondent and an editor-at-large for CNN for more than a decade. Segall also developed and hosted Mostly Human, an investigative docu-series that explored the impact of technology on sex, love, and death.
Donna Zuckerberg is an American classicist and author. She is author of the book Not All Dead White Men (2018), about the appropriation of classics by misogynist groups on the Internet. She was editor-in-chief of Eidolon, a classics journal, until its closure in 2020. She is a sister of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Advertising accounts for 97.8 percent of its revenue. Originally known as the parent company of the Facebook service, as Facebook, Inc., it was rebranded to its current name in 2021 to "reflect its focus on building the metaverse", an integrated environment linking the company's products and services.
