Facebook

Facebook is a social networking website. As of July 2007, it is the second most visited website of its kind on the World Wide Web, with over 28 million members. It is surpassed only by MySpace.

Facebook was restricted to members with a college or university email address, but has since been made available to any email address. People can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region. As of February 2007, the website had the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites with over 25 million members worldwide (also from non-collegiate networks).

Facebook is one of the most visited sites on the Internet, ranked between top 10–20 most visited websites as of June 2007 and is the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily. It is also the seventh most visited site in the United States.

The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff.

The site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April 2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million per week).[6] Users create profiles that often contain photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. The viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network or confirmed friends. According to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students in [previously] supported colleges have a profile [on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60% log in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and 93% log in at least once a month." According to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, "People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook."[7] In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New Jersey-based limited liability company specializing in research concerning the college student market, Facebook was named as the second most "in" thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex and losing only to the iPod.[8]


[edit] Origins and expansion

Mark Zuckerberg
The former banner of Facebook.comWikinews has news related to this article:
Facebook's fundingHarvard University, and Phillips Exeter Academy graduate Mark Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in February 2004, with support from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end of the month, more than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service. At that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz for site promotion and Facebook expanded to MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This expansion continued in April of 2004, when it expanded to the rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. The following month, Zuckerberg, McCollum, Hughes, and Moskovitz moved to Palo Alto, California to continue work on Facebook's development with additional help from Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker. In September, Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, the owners of the social networking website ConnectU filed a lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally used source code intended for a website they asked him to build for them.[9][10] Also at that time, Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December, Facebook's user base had exceeded one million.


[edit] 2005
In May 2005, Facebook raised $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners.[11] On August 23, 2005, Aboutface Corporation sold the domain name facebook.com to Facebook for $200,000. The website moved to this new domain name and dropped "the" from its name. As a part of the move, the site was overhauled to make profile pages more user-friendly, according to Zuckerberg. Afterwards, McCollum and Hughes returned to Harvard, although Hughes remained the site's spokesperson and McCollum remained on as a consultant and doing staff work during the summer. Then, on September 2, 2005, Zuckerberg launched the high school iteration of Facebook, calling it the next logical thing to do. At first, it was a completely separate entity to which users needed to be invited to join. However, in just fifteen days, most high school networks did not require a password to join. By October, Facebook's expansion had trickled down to most small universities and junior colleges in the United States, Canada, and The UK, in addition to having expanded to twenty-one universities in the United Kingdom, the entire Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) system in Mexico, the entire University of Puerto Rico network in Puerto Rico, and the whole University of the Virgin Islands network in the U.S. Virgin Islands. On December 11, 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to more than 2,000 colleges and more than 25,000 high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, more than 11,000,000 users worldwide.[12]


[edit] 2006
On February 27, 2006, Facebook began allowing college students to add high school students as friends due to requests from users.[13] About a month later, on March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a potential acquisition of the site was under negotiation. Facebook reportedly declined an offer of $750 million, and it was rumored that the asking price was as high as $2 billion.[14] In April, Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners invested an additional $25 million in the site.[15] In May, Facebook's network extended into India, at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The following month, Facebook threatened to seek costs of up to $100,000 from Quizsender.com for copyright infringement for allegedly copying the "look and feel" of Facebook.[16][17] On July 25, new services were offered in the site that would potentially produce additional revenue. A promotion was arranged between Facebook and iTunes, in which members of the Apple Students group would receive a free 25 song sampler each week until September 30 in various music genres. The promotion's purpose was to make students more familiar and enthusiastic with each service as fall classes approached.[18] In the early half of August, Facebook added universities in Germany and high schools in Israel, (Haifa, Jerusalem, and Qiryat Gat) to its network. On the 22nd of that month, Facebook introduced Facebook Notes, a blogging feature with tagging, embedded images, and other features, also allowing the importation of blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services. This newly added feature also included the common blog feature of allowing readers to comment on users' entries. On September 11, 2006, Facebook became open to all users of the Internet, prompting protest from its existing user base.[19] Two weeks later, Facebook opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail address (see below).[20]


[edit] 2007
On the 10th of May, Facebook announced a plan to add free, classified advertisements to its website, making it a competitor with established online companies such as Craigslist.[21] This feature, known as Facebook Marketplace, went live on May 14, 2007. On May 14, 2007, Facebook launched an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as Facebook Platform.[22] In June, the partnership begun the previous year between iTunes and Facebook continued, with the download service again offering free music samplers through the Apple Students group.


[edit] Sale rumors
In 2006, with the sale of social networking site MySpace to NewsCorp, rumors surfaced about the possible sale of Facebook to a larger media company. Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, has said that he does not want to sell the company and denies rumors to the contrary.[23] He has already rejected outright offers in the range of $975 million, and it is not clear who might be willing to pay a higher premium for the site. Steve Rosenbush, a technology business analyst, suspects Viacom.[24]

In September 2006, serious talks between Facebook and Yahoo! took place for the acquisition of the social network, with prices reaching as high as $1 billion.[25] In October, after Google purchased video-sharing site YouTube, rumors circulated that Google had offered $2.3 billion to outbid Yahoo![26]

Peter Theil, a board member of Facebook, indicated that Facebook's internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015, comparable to that of Viacom's MTV brand[27] and based on shared target demographic audience.


[edit] Criticisms

[edit] Lawsuit from Connectu.com
This article documents an ongoing lawsuit.
Information may change rapidly as the suit progresses.

Founder of Facebook.com, Mark Zuckerberg, has been accused of illegally using both the concept and source code from competing site Connectu.com. In November 2003, ConnectU engaged Mark Zuckerberg, then a sophomore at Harvard, to complete the computer programming for their website. Upon joining the ConnectU team, Zuckerberg was given complete unfettered access to the website code. Allegedly, Zuckerberg intentionally hampered the development of ConnectU while using code originally intended for ConnectU in the development of Facebook.

Since its original filing in Massachusetts the lawsuit has been dismissed without prejudice due to lack of diversity among parties. It was refiled on March 27, 2007[28] and is considered to be ongoing.


[edit] Privacy concerns
There have been some concerns expressed regarding the use of Facebook as a means of surveillance and data mining. Theories have been written about the possible misuse of Facebook[29] and privacy proponents have criticized the site's current privacy agreement.[30] According to the policy, "We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile." However, some features—such as AIM away-message harvesting and campus newspaper monitoring—have been dropped and Facebook has since responded to the concerns. Facebook has assured worried users the next privacy policy will not include the clause about information collection and has denied any data mining is being done "for the CIA or any other group."[31] However, the possibility of data mining by private individuals unaffiliated with Facebook remains open, as evidenced by the fact that two MIT students were able to download, using an automated script, over 70,000 Facebook profiles from four schools (MIT, NYU, the University of Oklahoma, and Harvard) as part of a research project on Facebook privacy published on December 14th, 2005.[32]

Another clause that some users are critical of reserves the right to sell users' data to private companies, stating "We may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship." This concern has also been addressed by spokesman Chris Hughes who said "Simply put, we have never provided our users' information to third party companies, nor do we intend to."[33] It is unclear if Facebook plans to remove that clause as well.

Facebook staff have the authority to view profiles in the event that the person is suspected of violating the site's terms of service.


[edit] News Feed and Mini-Feed

A sample Facebook home page taken on 11 April 2007, the day of the most recent layout update, showing the user's "News Feed". Friends' activities are documented and timestamped.On September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced two new controversial features called "News Feed" and "Mini-Feed". The first of the new features, News Feed, appears on every Facebook member's home page, displaying recent Facebook activities of a member's friends. The second feature, Mini-Feed, keeps a log of similar events on each member's profile page.[34] Members can manually delete items from their Mini-Feeds if they wish to do so, and through privacy settings are able to to control what is actually published in their respective Mini-Feeds.

Some Facebook members still feel that the ability to opt-out of the entire News Feed and Mini-Feed system is necessary, as evidenced by a statement from the Students Against Facebook News Feed group, which peaked at over 740,000 members.[35] However, according to recent news articles, members have widely regarded the additional privacy options as an acceptable compromise.[36]

Another problem is that the Facebook users may be under the impression that deleting something from one's Mini-Feed deletes it from the News Feed as well. It does not. In fact, there is no way to prevent some forms of updates to one's profile from being broadcast over the News Feed, as Facebook offers only a limited opt-out list. Users unaware of the News Feed function often unintentionally broadcast profile changes. Some information may even be sent over News-Feed without the knowledge of the user - for example, imported notes are put into the News Feed, even though notes can be set up to import automatically. This can automatically associate a user in the News Feed with whoever writes on the blog that they are importing.


[edit] Concerns of higher education faculty and administrators
On January 23, 2006, The Chronicle of Higher Education continued an ongoing national debate on social networks with an opinion piece written by Michael Bugeja, director of the Journalism School at Iowa State University, entitled "Facing the Facebook".[37] Bugeja, author of the Oxford University Press text Interpersonal Divide (2005), quoted representatives of the American Association of University Professors and colleagues in higher education to document the distraction of students using Facebook and other social networks during class and at other venues in the wireless campus. Bugeja followed up on January 26, 2007 in The Chronicle with an article titled "Distractions in the Wireless Classroom,"[38] quoting several educators across the country who were banning laptops in the classroom. Similarly, organizations such as the National Association for Campus Activities,[39] the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication,[40] and others have hosted seminars and presentations to discuss ramifications of students' use of Facebook and other social networking systems. The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative has also released a brief pamphlet entitled "7 Things You Should Know About Facebook" aimed at higher education professionals that "describes what [Facebook] is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning".[41]


[edit] Integration of high school users

This user has been rejected by too many people and must wait ten days before trying to add more friends.Following the February 27, 2006 integration of the high school and college levels, some college users began creating groups critical of the decision.[42] Users from opposite branches could only fully interact if they were friends and some separation did remain. The site also released the Limited Profile privacy settings and advised students on how to hide pictures and other features from others. However, some college users felt that the site's former exclusivity had been key to their experience.[43] Some expressed concerns about the ability of unknown persons to create accounts on the high school version (since university addresses are not required) and use them to access the college version; by default, strangers can message and view users' friends through a simple global search. Some made predictions that the site would soon face issues with spammers, stalkers, or worse, and worried this would result in controversies similar to the bad publicity seen by MySpace.[44]

Adding to the controversy around opening Facebook to younger students, four high school students at Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute in Toronto, Ontario were arrested in a Facebook-related protest on March 23, 2007. Earlier that week, five different students had been suspended for posting criticisms about a vice-principal of their school. About a dozen friends of the suspendees had decided to protest in front of the school, but that handful soon grew to over 100 students protesting for free speech. Local law enforcement authorities were called, and a scuffle ensued, resulting in the arrest of 4 students.[45]


[edit] Use in investigations
Main article: Use of social network websites in investigations
The information students provide on Facebook has been used in investigations by colleges, universities, and local police. Facebook's Terms of Use[46] specify that "the website is available for your personal, noncommercial use only", misleading some to believe that college administrators and police may not use the site for conducting investigations. However, there are settings on Facebook that allow a user to make his/her profile private (only people the user approves may see his/her profile).


[edit] Alcohol policy violations
There have been incidents where colleges and universities use Facebook to investigate underage drinking and violations of dry campus policies or discover them while investigating other incidents. For example, several Residence Community Advisors at McMaster University lost their jobs when pictures were discovered of them having casual drinks in a residence hall one night towards the end of semester.[47] Many high schools have also begun to use Facebook to crack down on underage drinking and other illegal activities.

In response to the monitoring, some students have begun to submit "red herring" party listings.[48] In one case at The George Washington University, shown at CakeParty.org,[49] students advertised their party and were raided by campus police. The police found only cake, no alcohol, and later claimed the break up had been triggered by a noise complaint.[50][51]


[edit] Other investigations
Students in sororities and fraternities at the University of Miami are constantly put on probation because of pictures anonymously printed off Facebook and given to the Dean.[citation needed] Rival sororities actually turn each other in[citation needed], hoping to disqualify them from events such as recruitment and highly competitive Greek Week.
The United States Secret Service met with a University of Oklahoma freshman in March 2005 after he posted a joke about assassinating President Bush. However, this investigation began after a fellow University of Oklahoma student alerted the Secret Service to the threat and did not stem from federal monitoring of the site as some suggested.[52]
During student government elections held in October 2005, results at the University of Missouri and the University of Pennsylvania were delayed due to early campaigning violations on Facebook.[53][54]
A student at Fisher College was expelled for suggesting that a campus police officer be illegally "set up" and that he "needs to be eliminated."[55]
At the University of Mississippi, a group of students were brought before the University's Judicial Board in April 2005 and forced to remove a Facebook group that professed their love for a professor (Dr. Anne Quinney) in a sexually suggestive manner.[56]
One Miami University student was arrested after he set a composite sketch of a rape suspect as his profile picture.[57]
Others have been punished for rushing the football field at Penn State (Many "I rushed the field" groups were created after the Nittany Lion football team defeated Ohio State in October 2005, and State College Police and Pennsylvania State Police used the groups to arrest those who they believed rushed the field in violation of school policy),[58]
A Duquesne University student was punished for hate speech against homosexuals.[59]
Four Syracuse University students were reprimanded for harassing an instructor in a Facebook group. The creator of the group was expelled from the school.[60] On the other hand, University of Louisville students who had created a Facebook group to complain about a professor's teaching shortcomings helped lead to the dismissal of their targeted instructor in February 2006, and the students were not punished.[61]
In February 2007, following the hit-and-run death of freshman Carlee Wines, University of Connecticut campus police used Facebook to link the suspected driver, Anthony P. Alvino of Lindenhurst, N.Y., to the university.[62] By following leads via Facebook, police learned of the connection between Alvino and his girlfriend, Michele A. Hall, a UConn student.[63] Alvino was charged for the hit-and-run, while Hall was charged with helping cover it up and hindering prosecution.
In April 2007, just days after the Virginia Tech shooting, a student at the SUNY College at Cobleskill was remanded into psychiatric care and suspended from college after posting a photo of himself on his profile with a vaguely threatening message underneath. This story became even more controversial as it grew across the news.[64][65]
During the University of Bath’s 2007 Student Union Elections, Presidential candidate George Pappadakis was disqualified from running due to a premature campaign on Facebook. The subsequent decision induced heavy debate and criticism.[66]

[edit] Other uses of profile information

Because of users' concern over who was viewing their photo albums (pictured), Facebook staff added privacy controls such as Limited Profile settings to restrict their display.Some employers look at Facebook profiles of prospective employees or interns.[67] Information posted on Facebook is potentially accessible to employers with faculty or alumni accounts.[68]

Information posted on the site is sometimes distributed publicly. Students who are related to politicians or other public figures have had screenshots of their profiles or photo albums taken and shared in an attempt to embarrass their relatives.[69] After profile information was posted on Gawker and Wonkette, two popular weblogs, Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, sent the sites' publishers cease and desist notices.[70] Also, a group calling itself Performing Politics, Inc. publicly displayed the profiles of students at Yale who had made comments about homosexuality in an effort to show evidence of homophobia at the school.[71]

In Wrentham, Massachusetts State Senator Scott P. Brown (R) was invited to speak at King Philip Regional High School to talk about his position against gay marriage. During the speech, Brown read verbatim several posts attacking him from a Facebook group dedicated to a pro-gay rights history teacher. Often he included both verbatim profanity and the names of the students who wrote them.[72]

Militant members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) in Britain have threatened students at Oxford who support the university's proposed South Parks laboratory saying they are legitimate targets for attack. A counter-activist group called Pro-Test has warned students not to support the lab's construction on Facebook as they believe ALF is monitoring the site.[73]

According to Facebook's privacy policy, Facebook reserves the right to release the information that users provide (including favorite movies, television shows, books, music, etc.) to organizations.


[edit] Responses

[edit] Schools block access
The University of New Mexico in October 2005 blocked access to Facebook from UNM campus computers and networks, citing unsolicited e-mails and a similar site called UNM Facebook.[74] After a UNM user signed into Facebook from off campus, a message from Facebook said, "We are working with the UNM administration to lift the block and have explained that it was instituted based on erroneous information, but they have not yet committed to restore your access." UNM, in a message to students who tried to access the site from the UNM network, wrote, "This site is temporarily unavailable while UNM and the site owners work out procedural issues. The site is in violation of UNM's Acceptable Computer Use Policy for abusing computing resources (e.g., spamming, trademark infringement, etc.). The site forces use of UNM credentials (e.g., NetID or email address) for non-UNM business." However, after Facebook created an encrypted login and displayed a precautionary message not to use university passwords for access, UNM unblocked access the following spring semester.[75]

The Columbus Dispatch reported on June 22, 2006, that Kent State University's athletic director had planned to ban the use of Facebook by athletes and gave them until August 1 to delete their accounts.[76] On July 5, 2006, the Daily Kent Stater reported that the director reversed the decision after reviewing the privacy settings of Facebook.


[edit] Facebook memorials
A notable ancillary effect of social networking websites, particularly Facebook, is the ability for participants to mourn publicly for a deceased individual. On Facebook, students often leave messages of sadness, grief, or hope on the individual's page, transforming it into a sort of public book of condolences. This particular phenomenon has been documented at a number of schools.[77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86] Previously, Facebook had stated that its official policy on the matter was to remove the profile of the deceased one month after he or she has died,[87] preventing the profile from being used for communal mourning, citing privacy concerns. Due to user response, Facebook amended its policy. (For examples of user petitions and discussion of the issues surrounding facebook memorialization, see the walls for the Facebook groups "Facebook Memorialization Is Misguided: Dead Friends Are Still People"[88] and "Write to Facebook about Memorialization"[89]) Its new policy is to place deceased members' profiles in a "memorialization state."[90]

Additional usage of Facebook as a tool of remembrance is expressed in group memberships on the site. Now that groups are community-wide and available among all networks, many users create Facebook groups to remember not only a deceased friend or individual, but also as a source of support in response to a great tragedy such as 9/11 or the crisis at Virginia Tech in April.


Customization and security
Facebook is often compared to MySpace but one significant difference between the two sites is the level of customization. MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and CSS while Facebook only allows plain text. However, a number of users have tweaked their profiles by using "hacks." On February 24, 2006, a pair of users exploited a cross-site scripting (XSS) hole on the profile page and created a fast-spreading worm, loading a custom CSS file on infected profiles that made them look like MySpace profiles.[91] Incidentally, both users are now employed by Facebook. On April 19, 2006, a user was able to embed an iframe into his profile and load a custom off-site page featuring a streaming video and a flash game from Drawball. He has since been banned from Facebook.[92] On March 26, 2006, a user was able to embed JavaScript in the "Hometown" field of his profile which imported his custom CSS.[93] In each case, Facebook quickly patched the holes, typically within hours of their discovery.


Imitators
Vkontakte (В Контакте - translated as "In Contact"), is a Russian Facebook clone made by Pavel Durov (Павел Дуров). It is one of the fastest growing websites in the .ru community, according to Alexa Web Search. Ironically, most Russian users are not aware of Facebook's existence and are quite surprised to find out that English-speakers enjoy a similar social community. Vkontakte Russian Wikipedia Article. It should be noted though that Pavel Durov acknowledges the fact that Facebook.com served as a model for Vkontakte.ru History Of Vkontakte.ru (In Russian)

Other Facebook clones throughout the world include German StudiVZ, Dutch Hyves, and Australian StudentFace. All these sites share Facebook's success in their corresponding countries to a certain extent, according to Alexa, thus showing the efficiency of Facebook's model in other communities.


Additional features

The Wall
The Wall is a space on each user's profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. One user's wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and different user's wall posts show up in an individual's News Feed. Many users use their friend's walls for leaving short, temporal notes. More private discourse is saved for Messages, which are sent to a person's Inbox, and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the Message, much like email.


Gifts

Some of Facebook's gifts, as displayed in the website's gift shop.In February 2007, Facebook added a new gift feature to the website. Friends could send "gifts" (small icons of novelty items) to each other by selecting one from Facebook's virtual gift shop and adding a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient's wall with the giver's message, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately, in which case the giver's name and message is not displayed to other users. Additionally, all gifts (including private gifts) received by a user are displayed in the recipient's "gift box" (right above their wall on their profile), marked with either the first name of the user (for public gifts) or the word "Private." An "Anonymous" option is also available, by which anyone with profile access can see the gift, but only the recipient will see the message. No one will see the giver's name, and the gift will go in the recipient's gift box but not the wall.

Some Facebook users are given one free gift to give; each additional gift given by a user costs US$1.00. The initial selection of gifts was Valentine's Day themed, and 50% of the proceeds received through February 2007 were donated to the charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure. After the month of February, the proceeds were no longer donated. Soon after, Facebook began making one new gift available each day, most of which had a limited supply or were available for a limited time. The daily new gift is advertised on every user's home page.

With the advent of Applications came a way to subvert the required US$1.00 payment; however, the gifts in the "Free Gifts" application, created by Zachary Allia, are not the same as the official gifts, as they are displayed in a different manner.


Marketplace
In May 2007, Facebook introduced the Facebook Marketplace allowing users to post free classified ads within the following categories: For Sale, Housing, Jobs, and Other. Ads can be posted in either available or wanted format. The market place is available for all Facebook users and is currently free.


Pokes
Facebook includes a "poke" feature which allows one user to send a "poke" to another. In principle this is intended to serve as a "nudge" to attract the attention of the other user. However while many Facebook users, as intended, use the feature to attract attention or say hello, some users construe it as a sexual advance. This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group entitled "Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex," which, as of June 2007, has more than 200,000 members.

There are several new applications such as "X Me" by Jia Shen and "SuperPoke!" by Nikil Gandhy, Will Liu and Jonathan Hsu that allow users to do more than just poke other users. They can do various things using these applications such as hug, pinch, bite, kiss, bitchslap, tickle, or trip.

Status
The "status" feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions. Facebook prompts the status update with "(User name) is..." and Facebook users fill in the rest. Status updates are noted in the "Recently updated" section of a users' friend list. After the Virginia Tech massacre, one Virginia Tech Facebook member updated her status to let friends and family know she was safe.[97]


Applications
In June 2007, Facebook allowed users to develop applications within the framework of the site.

These applications include "Questionnaires, Surveys, Polls, Votes and Petitions", which enables users to create, share and respond to questionnaires, either for fun, to get to know friends better or for research purposes; "The Filter," which gives the user the ability to display music information on their profile; "Honesty Box" which allows people to anonymously tell their friends what they "really" feel about them; "Food Fight!," where users can "buy" and "throw" food at each other; "Graffiti," which lets users "draw" on each others' profiles; and "Top Friends," which gives a Facebook profile the same mechanism to select their "top" 4-32 friends. There are also several gaming applications such as the ilike challenge, which is a music trivia game that allows a user to compete against their friends.

On June 24, Facebook hit 1,000 new applications users can put onto their profiles.[citation needed]

Facebook Markup Language
Facebook Markup Language is a subset of the HTML markup language. It allows Facebook application writers to customize the "look and feel" of their applications, to a limited extent