Businessweek

Facebook, Inc. operates as a social networking company. The company enables people to stay connected with their friends and family, to discover what is going on in the world around them and to share and express what matters to them to the people they care about. For Users Connect and Share with Your Friends: With approximately one billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook users are increasingly able to find and stay connected with their friends, family, and colleagues on Facebook. Discover and Learn: Each person's experience on Facebook is based on the content shared by friends and connections. This content is personalized for each user in the company’s products, such as News Feed and Timeline. Express Yourself: The company enables people to share and publish their opinions, ideas, photos, and activities to audiences ranging from their closest friends to its one billion users, giving everyone a voice within the Facebook community. Through Facebook's privacy and sharing settings, people can control what they share and with whom they share it. Stay Connected Everywhere: People can access Facebook through the company’s Website, mobile sites, smartphone applications, and feature phone products. Through applications and Websites built by developers using the Facebook Platform, people can interact with their Facebook friends while playing games, listening to music, watching movies, reading news, and engaging in other activities across the Web and on mobile devices. The company’s product development approach is centered on building the most useful tools that enable people to connect, share, discover, and communicate with each other on mobile devices and computers. Timeline: Timeline allows people to organize and display the events and activities that matter most to them, enabling them to curate their memories in a searchable personal narrative that is organized chronologically. People choose what information to share on their Timeline, such as their interests, photos, education, work history, relationship status, and contact information, and people can control with whom each piece of content is shared on their Timeline. News Feed: The Facebook News Feed is the core feature of a person's homepage and is a regularly updating list of stories from friends, Pages, and other entities to which the person is connected on Facebook. It includes posts, photos, event updates, group memberships, app updates, and other activities. Each person's News Feed is personalized based on interests and the sharing activity of friends. Stories in a user's News Feed are prioritized based on various factors, including how many friends have Liked or Commented on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is. Photos and Videos: Facebook is the major photo uploading service on the Web. People can upload an unlimited number of high resolution photos, create photo albums, and share them with their friends or any audience they choose. Users can also upload and share videos. People can set specific privacy settings for each of their photo albums and videos, making them visible to everyone, or only to certain friends. In 2012, the company acquired Instagram, Inc., a mobile phone-based photo-sharing service, to improve its photos product offerings and to enable users to increase their levels of mobile engagement and photo sharing. Messages: The company’s messaging products include email, chat, and text messaging. The delivery of messages is optimized for the device through which the person is accessing Facebook. For Developers The Facebook Platform is a set of development tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) that enables developers to integrate with Facebook to create social applications and Websites and to reach its approximately one billion users. Approximately 10 million applications and Websites were integrated with Facebook as of December 31, 2012. Facebook offers tools and APIs that enable developers to increase growth, engagement and monetization. Growth: The company enables Platform developers to reach its global user base and use its distribution channels