WEB 2.0 AND RECRUITING

If you are like me and have moved around since your high school days, you may not have seen old classmates, friends, neighbors, or distant family in many years. I’ve enjoyed connecting with old friends that I haven’t seen in 30 years. Facebook is a social utility for connecting people with those around them – friends, family, coworkers, or simply others with similar interests. Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. 1

Facebook started in 2004 as a closed community for college students (requiring users to sign up with a valid university email address) but has since expanded beyond that to high schools, corporations, regional networks, or any user across the world. Facebook allows users to connect and share information in a variety of ways.

The interesting thing about Facebook is that you connect with someone you haven’t seen in years and see what is going on in their life. You have the ability to see their contact information, educational history, photos, connections to their website or blog, if they have one, and view comments they have posted.

Following are some facts posted by Facebook. 2

General Growth
• More than 300 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

User Engagement
• Average user has 130 friends on the site
• More than 6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 40 million status updates each day
• More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day

Applications
• More than 2 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 14 million videos uploaded each month
• More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week
• More than 3 million events created each month
• More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site

International Growth
• More than 65 translations available on the site
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

References:
1. http://www.new.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics#/press/info.php?factsheet
2. http://www.new.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Marty Brack
E-mail: mdbrack@crimson.ua.edu
Cell: 205-837-4098