A Brief Analysis of Facebook as Product

This article provides a brief analysis of Facebook as a product, including its history, experience, interactivity, infrastructure, convenience, health issues, downsides, and specifications for a social medium. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using Facebook and proposes a social network that combines knowledge sharing and user interaction. The article also includes information on Facebook's assets, cost of setup, and maintenance issues.

Running head: A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF "FACEBOOK" AS PRODUCT
A Brief Analysis of "Facebook" as Product
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s note

1A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF "FACEBOOK" AS PRODUCT
Table of Contents
1. Introduction............................................................................................................................2
2. Discussion..............................................................................................................................3
2.1 A Brief History on Facebook...........................................................................................3
2.2 The Experience of Facebook............................................................................................3
2.3 Interactivity of Facebook.................................................................................................4
2.4 Infrastructure of Facebook...............................................................................................4
2.5 Convenience of Using Facebook.....................................................................................5
2.6 Health Issues Related to Facebook..................................................................................5
2.7 The Downsides of Facebook............................................................................................6
2.8 Specifications for a Social Medium.................................................................................6
2.9 Other Major Specifications............................................................................................10
3. Conclusion............................................................................................................................11
4. Recommendation..................................................................................................................11
5. References............................................................................................................................13

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1. Introduction
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 4th 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.

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2. Discussion
2.1 A Brief History on Facebook
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).
2.2 The Experience of Facebook
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.
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).

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2.3 Interactivity of Facebook
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).
2.4 Infrastructure of Facebook
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).

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2.5 Convenience of Using Facebook
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.
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).
2.6 Health Issues Related to Facebook
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

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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).
2.7 The Downsides of Facebook
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.
2.8 Specifications for a Social Medium
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

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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.

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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

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further adjustment in a lovely virtuous cycle. This process could be applied globally or
locally.
(Fig 1: Design of the Network)
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

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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.
2.9 Other Major Specifications
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

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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)
3. 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.
4. Recommendation
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

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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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5. References
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school teacher–student interactions in Facebook: The teacher perspective. Computers &
Education, 85, pp.134-148.
Berwick, D.M., 2016. Era 3 for medicine and health care. Jama, 315(13), pp.1329-1330.
Brügger, N., 2015. A brief history of Facebook as a media text: The development of an empty
structure. First Monday, 20(5).
Feitelson, D.G., Frachtenberg, E. and Beck, K.L., 2013. Development and deployment at
facebook. IEEE Internet Computing, 17(4), pp.8-17.
Fox, J. and Moreland, J.J., 2015. The dark side of social networking sites: An exploration of
the relational and psychological stressors associated with Facebook use and
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Gangadharbatla, H., Bright, L.F. and Logan, K., 2014. Social media and news gathering:
tapping into the millennial mindset. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 3(1).
Grieve, R., Indian, M., Witteveen, K., Tolan, G.A. and Marrington, J., 2013. Face-to-face or
Facebook: Can social connectedness be derived online?. Computers in human
behavior, 29(3), pp.604-609.
Hays, S., Page, S.J. and Buhalis, D., 2013. Social media as a destination marketing tool: its
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traits, social cohesion, and motives. Computers in Human Behavior, 30, pp.50-58.

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Holm, T., Klein, T., Löschberger, A., Klamp, T., Wiebusch, G., van de Linde, S. and Sauer,
M., 2014. A Blueprint for Cost‐Efficient Localization Microscopy. ChemPhysChem, 15(4),
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Judd, T., 2014. Making sense of multitasking: The role of Facebook. Computers &
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implementation research. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health
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