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Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student. Initially the membership of Facebook was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to MIT, Boston University, Boston College, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools on February 27, 2006 and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, anyone 13 or older may join.Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

The site has more than 58 million active users (including non-collegiate members) worldwide,with membership expected to surpass 60 million users by the end of 2007. From September 2006 to September 2007 the site's traffic ranking increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa. It is the number one site for photos in the United States with over 60 million photos uploaded weekly.

The name of the site refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of the campus community that some U.S. colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

On November 7, 2007, Facebook announced Facebook Ads; Facebook Beacon, a marketing initiative which includes a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their Facebook friends ; the capability of businesses to host pages on Facebook for various brands, products and services (Facebook Pages). On November 30, 2007, it was reported that Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing had invested $60 million in Facebook.
One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums of photos, tag friends, and comment on photos. According to Facebook, there are:

* 1.7 billion user photos
* 2.2 billion friends tagged in user photos
* 160 terabytes of photo storage used with an extra 60 terabytes available
* 60+ million photos added each week which take up 5 terabytes of disk space
* 3+ billion photo images served to users every day
* 100,000+ images served per second during our peak traffic windows

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