Review: The Online Community of Facebook

I guess by now everybody knows that Facebook is a social networking website .It was started in 1194 by as a way of interaction for Harvard University students. Slowly its popularity rose to different colleges and now it has become one of the most prominent networking sites with over 120 million members worldwide. So what all does Facebook offer?

For starters Facebook provide a great opportunity to interact with friends irrespective of the geographical location. It even helps us to find long lost friend which we had forgotten in the ways of life. To create a Facebook account, all you need to give is your full name, email id, password and your date of birth and you are ready to go. You then need to generate your profile which gives an outline about you like your birthday, interests, relationship status and other personal details. All this is optional and it’s all up to you as to how much information you want to give about you. Facebook also has easy to use privacy settings which allow you to control who has access to various aspects of your profile. You can go creative and design and change some of the default settings of your page.

The main mode of interaction in Facebook is the Wall which is nothing but a place where you can leave a message for your friend .You can also send a private message just like an email if you want the message to be 'private'. Other than that Facebook also offers a live chat option just like any other online chats like Yahoo and GTalk. With so many options you have the flexibility to pick and chose any option you want according to your need. You can also join the various online communities as per your tastes.

To keep tabs of the new updates in your page as well as of your friends, Facebook offers feeds to you which tells us what new changes have taken place like if somebody has added a new photo or video, send you a message etc .This provides a good way of keeping tabs on your friends life, as the information comes to you rather than you going to get it.

You can add photos to your profiles and set the privacy settings for them as per your comfort. You can also tag a photo to your friend and vice-versa .Tagging is nothing but sharing of photos with your friends. The photo you have tagged to your friend will appear in his profile also. Facebook also gives the option to untag a photo if you don't want it in your profile.

Facebook also offers a platform for public personalities and business units to be part of the Facebook community to increase their popularity by reaching to a massive user base. They can do this by creating a public profile, called as Facebook page. With this they can easily send broadcast message, share photos and videos with other users. Users can also leave a message to these public figures like any other Facebook profile.