FacebookA lot has changed since the early days of Facebook when it was full of status updates and photos from friends

A lot has changed since the early days of Facebook News Feed when it was full of status updates and photos from friends. Facebook has gotten crowded with brands and pages vying for eyeballs. It has become a place where people, especially teenagers and young adults, don’t feel as comfortable sharing their lives.

Originally called “Facemash”, Mark Zuckerberg established the first version of Facebook at Harvard University in 2003. It was initially designed to mimic the website Hot or Not, which was a social media website rating users based on their level of attractiveness. Zuckerberg and his friends hacked into Harvard’s computer network in order to collect student images. Within the first four hours of launching the site, Facemash had over 22,000 views.

Zuckerberg was soon shut down by his university and placed on a six-month period of academic probation since he obtained students’ photos without consent. Eventually, after this probation period was completed, Zuckerberg moved on to create Facebook, which launched officially in 2004. Within one month, half of Harvard’s undergraduate student body signed up. Soon, Zuckerberg opened up the website to other universities, such as Stanford and Yale. In order to join, students needed an email address ending in “.edu”. As time progressed, Facebook continued to grow via the addition of new universities, high school students, and eventually, the general public. By the end of 2005, Facebook had over US$9 million in revenue and six million monthly users.

Today, CEO Zuckerberg’s net worth is estimated to be around US$67 billion. Facebook is now one of the greatest examples of the power of social media and the incredible effectiveness of implementing user data analysis to generate high revenue.

But that is changing with the new Discovery Engine strategy. To make Facebook and Instagram more like TikTok, Meta will serve users more content from strangers using AI. What will this push mean for the future of Facebook and how we use it?

Running the operations of Facebook is an enormous task. First, there’s a massive scale of its global infrastructure and network and the absolute priority Facebook places on reliable services to provide a unique user experience. Operations in Facebook are expected to constantly create new flexibility and capacity for the business to pursue its broader innovation agenda. Looking forward, Facebook’s ambitious initiatives include its Connectivity Lab (a plan to bring internet access to those around the world who lack it), AI and deep learning, and virtual reality as a next-generation computing platform.

Facebook is a platform for big data and the data is one of its main assets for Facebook. We are not only living in a world of big data, but we are also living in a world where the data is getting bigger by the second. As the data grows, the responsibility for protecting the data while still maintaining the business model is becoming more challenging. Also the sustainable growth of platform ecosystems happens when platform users supply and demand content from each other as on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Facebook uses user data in many ways (Facebook Data Policy). This can be personal data that users provide like gender, date of birth, location, religion, etc. or It can be data that is collected constantly without prompting such as tracking user movements, knowing the location of a photo, or the date that the files (images) were created, device information and network information. All of this data combined can be used to personalize the user experience by providing targeted ads, news feeds and sponsored content.