9781422277287

F acebook. Think about howmuch that single word means to many people’s everyday life. If you’re not one of the more than two billion monthly active users on Facebook—rep- resenting more than 25 percent of the world’s population—it’s still hard to avoid Facebook’s reach. If you read news articles online, you’ll likely see a link asking you to share the article on Facebook; if you walk into a store, you may see a sign asking you to “like us on Facebook.” The fact that Facebook is everywhere is a testament to its success in the field of social media. “Social media” is a way that people can connect to one an- other over the internet. Facebook owes its entire existence to this human need to connect, and it has found countless ways to help fulfill that desire. Facebook famously started out in a Harvard dorm room, the brainchild of whiz kid Mark Zuckerberg. Enlisting the help of some of his friends—and later, thousands of the best engineers and computer scientists in the world— Mark found a way to tap into the basic human need for connecting to and with each other. The result has been nothing short of astounding. Facebook, the company, was worth nearly $500 billion as of December 2017. This ranks it the fourth most-valuable company in America, behind only Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), and Microsoft. Facebook has only existed since 2004, yet its value has already grown past well-known companies that have been in business for more than a century, such as General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, ExxonMobil, and JP Morgan Chase.

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