A Brief History on Facebook

Discuss about the Challenges of Incorporating Virtual Currency.

Facebook is one of the most popular free website based on the social networking platform. The website provides facility to the users to register within their website. The registered users would then be able to create their personal profiles, upload videos and photos, and keep touch with their friends by sending messages and several other features (Judd 2014). Facebook is online social media platform and a social networking service, which is mainly based in America. Their main headquarters is located in Menlo Park, California. The website of Facebook was primarily launched on 4^th February, 2004. This company was mainly launched by Mark Zuckerberg.

The website is mainly available in 37 different form of languages that includes many public features that includes the common marketplace, pages, events, groups and presence of technology. There are several components of key networking within the profile of each of the members who are associated within the company.

With major improvements within the development of the website, Facebook is able to offer a wide range of options based on privacy for their users. This option provides the facility to the user for describing the privacy options and thus making them visible to everyone. The user would also be able to block some of the connections based on their level of thinking of privacy (Trainor et al. 2014). The members would also be able to choose the options, which could be searched by the users. They would also be able to choose the parts of their profile that could be viewed by the public. There is also a personal feature of message, which would almost resemble the feature of email.

The company, Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg. Initially, the membership of the website was limited within the students of Harvard University. After the popularity of Facebook, the company was expanded to several other colleges within the area of Boston. Later, the company was expanded to most of the universities within Canada and the United States, various corporations. In September 2006, the company was able to provide their users with a valid email address that would require an age requirement of 13 years or older (Brügger 2015).

Unlike most of the social networking sites, Facebook offers a different feel than most of the other websites. The entire system of Facebook is highly organized and helps in engaging with other registered users. The main objective of Facebook is to help the users in accessing and displaying personal information and also the information regarding other users as per their needs (Simon, Brexendorf and Fassnacht 2013). The users would also be able to pursue several form of connections between all kinds of people. The visitors are greeted with the impression based on search activity on their newsfeed. They would also be provided the facility for sharing of ideas. Facebook is a huge source of information and a proper place for communication. It is also a multi-layered area based on the performance of identity. The access to Facebook is mainly through the help of desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and many other digital kind of devices.

Infrastructure of Facebook

In the year of 2007, Facebook had gained the majority of the popularity on the global platform. They had expanded their user base for the inclusion of different kinds of people beyond the reach of students (Grieve et al. 2013). 

The initial focus of development was in implementing the features that would support the interactivity of the user and thus would ensure that they should be connected throughout the services. The focus on the purpose of interactivity was the most essential part in the service building, which would support the behaviour of the users and the goals. This would also help in providing value for the users. The company in the eventual phases of the improvements on the purpose of interactivity had added two concepts such as Groups and Wall. These concepts were derived from the different needs of the small community of users (Ki and Nekmat 2014).

The huge increasing number of the base of users within Facebook has been resulted due to a high degree of the open framework of infrastructure within Facebook. The deployment of the platform of Facebook API would need a high level of open infrastructure that will have a fewer amount of limitations on the number of users. At the phase of integration of various upgrades within the website of Facebook, there are several factors that would affect the complexity within the infrastructure (Plantin et al. 2018).

In the first stage, Facebook had a very large amount of user base. The large amount of users might have several kind of consequences for the purpose of infrastructure. One of the technological consequence is there would be a larger demand for the resources based on server-side within the systems of Facebook. Another kind of consequence is based on heterogeneity based on various use practices and a large variety of users. Different kinds of users use Facebook for a variety of reasons in order to communicate with their colleagues and friends. They are also able to manage the documents related to the work, sell different kinds of stuff and many other purposes (Feitelson, Frachtenberg and Beck 2013).

Facebook is one of the most powerful social media platform, which could be used for connecting with friends, family, colleagues and even connect with new people. The advantages of using this social media platform is that this could be used a medium to maintain a healthy relationship with other people. The company gives the permissibility of establishing different forms of partnership among various kinds of projects (Kapp, Peters and Oliver 2013). With the help of describing a Facebook Fan Page, an individual would be able to increase the value of their brand and thus establish a higher form of presence of their business on the social media. This social media platform could also be used to find new clients and business leads.

Health Issues Related to Facebook

The platform could also be used as a video chatting tool. In the recent times, Facebook has also implemented the video chat feature with partnership with Skype. Facebook is also used as a popular site in order to host videos and images (Hollenbaugh and Ferris 2014). Different kind of level of privacy could be set based on individual albums and this could be used to control the view from the public. Users can also download the entire collection of Facebook videos and photos with the help of the feature of Facebook backup account (O’Bannon, Beard and Britt 2013).

It has been acknowledged buy Facebook that the use of this platform of social media could be a sign of bad usage for the mental health of the users. It has also been found that those people who would have clicked on different links have been reported of serious issues of mental health (Zhang and Sang 2013). The theory also suggests that the use of these kinds of social media platform would be taking people from the engagement of social life of the people. The social media platform had also received complaints from several people that the excessive use of Facebook within the teenagers was resulting in several health disorders such as changes within the self-esteem, high percentage of depression among students and sleep disorders. These kind of students were extremely unaware of these kind of adverse effects. The complaints also included special kind of symptoms related to health such as eye irritation, headache and other kinds of symptoms (Berwick 2016). 

The downsides of Facebook mainly occur in the cases of real–life problems. Over-sharing on Facebook would mostly occur within teenagers and young adults, but this problem is not only limited to those groups of people. This problem could also be able to ruin different kinds of job opportunities (Fox and Moreland 2015).

Another downside of Facebook is that their feature of anonymity. This downside could be used to bully different people. This mainly occurs within the teenage groups.

Addiction on the Facebook platform would also incur many kinds of problems within the teenage group. People might would be able to develop a factor of dependency on the Facebook platform. Individuals might also become unproductive and restless when they would visit the website (Asterhan and Rosenberg 2015).

There is also another form of downside such as spam. There is a lot of junk within the platform of social media in the form of invitations and status updates.

Facebook was considered as a largest media for social gathering in past years. However, the situation is changing day by day. According to some sources, the Facebook is still considered as largest social network. However, the margin of popularity is hugely decreasing as other social media sites are evolving gradually. Facebook was innovative and new when they first appears in the market, however, they were unable to evolve effectively with the evolution of people mind-set. The idea of social gathering is been a common aspect of every social network. Several social network offer several type of mechanism to attract user for spending time into those sites (Gangadharbatla, Bright and Logan 2014). Facebook is mainly appreciated for enabling user to user interaction like twitter, Instagram and Whatsapp as well. On other hand, sites like YouTube follows different approach as they enable carrier growth of content makers by providing them a good amount of pay based on their watch time.

After analyzing all the social network activities and features they offer (Manikonda, Hu and Kambhampati 2014). I would propose a social network which is capable of both knowledge sharing and user interaction at same time. In the social network, every user can have their own pages like Facebook. However, this pages must be associated with some dedicated field like technology, gaming update, gameplay and vlogs as well. Unlike YouTube, this social network will be able to showcase both blogs and videos in same page. One user can have multiple pages with different names and field. Users will be also able to follow other user and share each other contents in their page by getting permission from the content owner. By signing in, every user will get a basic amount of virtual yellow currency which is need to unlock access over particular section on different pages (Sheehan 2015).

Assets: Facebook cash equivalents increased from 2015 to 2016 but then the rate is slightly decreases from 2016 to2017 due to the competitive market.  From the capital sources of the assets, some of the assets are funded through shareholders paid in capital and retained earnings of the business. Others are funded through borrowed money. Facebook current assets is equivalent to around 90B dollar as calculated in June 2018 (Lee 2015).

Cost of setup: As we all know, Facebook was created by mark single handed from scratch. He created the social network by programming thousands lines of code. Mark states in interview that at start up Facebook was just running on basic set of codes and one server. The server cost $85 per month for rent and it took one year to reach one million user. They had no cash to run Facebook for years. Later, the co-founder Eduardo Saverin was responsible for finding ads as AdSense to spread their brand name in all over the world (Holm et al. 2014).

For constructing the proposed social network site million lines of code is necessary which can be outsourced by programmers. This mush of codes can cost approximately $25,000 to 2 million dollar. Other than coding, other investments are applicable as server cost, ad cost and maintain cost. Finally, it can take up to millions dollar to turn the design into reality. However, the beta version can be constructed with minimal amount of investment. Many businesses fake it until they make it. Dropbox released a video demonstrating the simplicity of the app on its site before the product was even close to complete. Coin started without even having a shippable product, and it has been collecting thousands of pre-orders. So the basic system can be implemented with around $25,000 and at the end of the life cycle the cost may increase to 20 or 30 million dollar.

Maintenance issues: From the start up in 2004, Facebook faced several critical and minor maintenance issue. In current time, Facebook has more than thousand server which are hard to maintain and monitor manually. So they implemented machine learning to check logs, analytics and many more.  They are using a system of self-tuning that they have dubbed spiral. This is pretty nifty as it teaches the system the right way to tune and monitor. The system maintains the data log and processes it with the help of Spiral that is connected with just a few lines of computer code. It then sends commands back to the server based on the declarative coding statements written by the team. In order to ensure that those commands are always being fine-tuned at the same time, the data gets sent from the server to a model for further adjustment in a lovely virtuous cycle. This process could be applied globally or locally.

They had also planned to build a major enhancement on top of FBAR, which is called aggregate maintenance handlers. They mainly offer a way to safely automate maintenance on several server at once. The FBAR includes methods in order to disable and renewable a single host at a time with the help of executing these methods in a serial or parallel manner was not a safe enough approach for the primary purpose of working on multiple hosts at once.

For the discussed proposed social network, some other systems can be implemented to maintain the data handling and servers. However, the Facebook maintenance process is effective among others. The maintenance system includes pre-flight check which is pretty effective to maintain the servers. The pre-flight check is called at the start of the process of disable and checks the availability within the unaffected servers for performing the safe maintenance. It provides returns in terms of true or false that decides whether the maintenance work to move forward or halts it. When all pre-flight checks are passed, the Aggregate Maintenance Handlers allow us to wrap a smart layer of code around the pre-existing host-level disable/enable logic.

Data collection: Facebook collects user browsing data to point specific ads. It is an effective way to earn huge amount of revenue.

For the proposed network, the process could be same, however, user must be notified that their certain data is been collected and stored safely into the database. This would help in maintaining a healthy relationship with the client and thus would ensure the trust between both the parties. The methods for the collection of data should be based on different set of languages. The content should be translated in different languages for the benefit of the users. Data mining is also an important tool for the collection of data. This would be highly necessary for knowing the preferences of each user and based on that the social media would be able to provide suggestions for their users (Palinkas et al. 2015).

Marketing: For the purpose of marketing, the similar approach can be considered as Facebook did the marketing by advertisement.

For the proposed network, it would be advisable to properly plan the marketing strategy in order to gain hold over the marketing scenario. The business should be aware about the target audience who would use this platform. They should offer additional facilities in order to attract the target audience. They should also decide the ways in which their users would be affected with the use of the new social media platform. The audience should be clear about the message that would be conveyed by the business. This would help in gaining a stand within the highly competitive market (Hays, Page and Buhalis 2013)

Conclusion

Based on the discussion from the report, it could be concluded that the use of Facebook as a product could be very much useful for shaping the various ways in which the users would manage their online identity. Different kinds of rules related to online privacy would be needed to be implemented for protect the online identity of the users. The laws based on privacy would be helpful for different corporations from the disclosing of vital information without the consent of an individual. Facebook has a huge amount of potential and this could be implemented for the purpose of improving the deep internal networks within the platform.

Based on the derived conclusions regarding the use of the social media platform, it could be discussed that there could be some recommendations within the social media platform. This would majorly impact the revenue of the business model of the company. In order to improve the efficiency of the website, the following things should be taken into consideration.

The primary thing, which is of utmost importance is the matter of privacy. The website should implement newer measures related to the aspect of privacy within their content visibility factor. Third party users should not be able to view such kind of content that would be shared between two individuals until the consent is granted by those individuals (Van Dijck 2013).

There should also be a proper report system. There are some contents, which are bad and might be inappropriate for some users. There are certain pages that violate the norms of the Facebook Terms of Service. This should be taken into account by the higher level management team within the company. They should highly treat these matters so as to stop the wrong actions within the website.

They should also focus within the part of the infrastructure in order to enhance the use of the website. They should implement newer kind of tools such as text-based online speech that would be easy to control and access (Mostafa 2013). They should also implement tolls within the infrastructure of the website in order to promote efficiency and collaboration. Various kinds of incredible and secure solutions should be deployed for the effective use of the users. The IT teams should also take into consideration regarding the health of the website and their leading mobile applications.

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