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Double
Down Interactive
Profiles
Games
Facebook
Double
Down Interactive
Profiles
Games
Social
Media Facebook
Double
Down Interactive hosts the world’s largest online,
non-gambling casino game. At the DoubleDown Casino,
players can win big (virtual currency) playing slots,
blackjack, video poker, and roulette, as well as participating
in slot tournaments.
DoubleDown
Casino is one of the fastest growing casual game applications
on Facebook and on the web, with over 750,000 daily
players and over 3 million playing each month.
Facebook is a social networking website, launched
on February 4, 2004. 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 school,
place of employment, or geographic region.
The
site has more than 62 million active users (including
non-collegiate members) worldwide.[4] From September
2006 to September 2007 the site's traffic ranking
increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa.[5]
It is the most popular website for uploading photos,
with 14 million uploaded daily.[4]
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.
Operations
The
site is free to users and generates revenue from advertising
including banner ads and sponsored groups (in April
2006, revenue was rumored to be over $1.5 million
per week).[6] Users create profiles that often contain
photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private
or public messages, and join groups of friends. The
viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to
users from the same network or confirmed friends.
According to TechCrunch, "about 85% of students
in [previously] supported colleges have a profile
[on the site]. [Of those who are signed up,] 60% log
in daily. About 85% log in at least once a week, and
93% log in at least once a month." According
to Chris Hughes, spokesman for Facebook, "People
spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook."[7]
In a 2006 study conducted by Student Monitor, a New
Jersey-based limited liability company specialising
in research concerning the college student market,
Facebook was named as the second most "in"
thing among undergraduates, tied with beer and sex
and losing only to the iPod.[8]
History
Facebook's funding
Mark
Zuckerberg founded "The Facebook" in February
2004, while attending Harvard University, with support
from Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. By the end
of the month, more than half of the undergraduate
population at Harvard were registered on the service.
At that time, Zuckerberg was joined by Dustin Moskovitz
and Chris Hughes for site promotion and Facebook expanded
to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[9] This expansion
continued in April of 2004 when it expanded to the
rest of Ivy League and a few other schools. At the
end of the school year, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz moved
out to Palo Alto, California with McCollum, who had
a summer internship at Electronic Arts. They rented
a house near Stanford University where they were joined
by Adam D'Angelo and Sean Parker. Soon McCollum decided
to leave EA and help with the development of Facebook
and a companion website, Wirehog, full-time. In September,
Divya Narendra, Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss,
the owners of the social networking website HarvardConnection,
subsequently changed to ConnectU, filed a lawsuit
against Facebook, alleging that Zuckerberg had illegally
used source code intended for the website they asked
him to build for them.[10][11] Also at that time,
Facebook received approximately $500,000 from PayPal
co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round. By December,
Facebook's user base had exceeded one million.
2005
In
May 2005, Facebook raised $12.8 million in venture
capital from Accel Partners.[12] On August 23, 2005,
Facebook bought the domain name facebook.com from
the Aboutface Corporation for $200,000 and dropped
"the" from its name. At that time the site
was overhauled, a change intended to make profile
pages more user-friendly, according to Zuckerberg.
Also that month McCollum went back to Harvard although
he continued to serve as a consultant and returned
to work on staff during the summers. As before, Hughes
remained in Cambridge while he performed his duties
as company spokesperson. Then, on September 2, 2005,
Zuckerberg launched the high school iteration of Facebook,
calling it the next logical thing to do. While initially
described as separate "communities" to which
users needed to be invited to participate, within
only fifteen days most high school networks did not
require a password to join (although registration
with Facebook was still necessary.) By October, Facebook's
expansion had trickled down to most small universities
and junior colleges in the United States, Canada,
and the UK, in addition to having expanded to twenty-one
universities in the United Kingdom, the entire Instituto
Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
(ITESM) system in Mexico, the entire University of
Puerto Rico network in Puerto Rico, and the whole
University of the Virgin Islands network in the U.S.
Virgin Islands. On December 11, 2005, universities
in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook
network, bringing its size to more than 2,000 colleges
and more than 25,000 high schools throughout the United
States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia,
New Zealand, and Ireland.[13]
2006
On
February 27, 2006, Facebook began allowing college
students to add high school students as friends due
to requests from users.[14] About a month later, on
March 28, 2006, BusinessWeek reported that a potential
acquisition of the site was under negotiation. Facebook
reportedly declined an offer of $750 million, and
it was rumored that the asking price was as high as
$2 billion.[15] In April, Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners,
and Meritech Capital Partners invested an additional
$25 million in the site.[16] In May, Facebook's network
extended into India, at Indian Institutes of Technology
(IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).
The following month Facebook threatened to seek costs
of up to $100,000 from Quizsender.com for copyright
infringement for allegedly copying the "look
and feel" of Facebook.[17][18] On July 25, new
services were offered in the site that would potentially
produce additional revenue. A promotion was arranged
between Facebook and iTunes, in which members of the
Apple Students group would receive a free 25 song
sampler each week until September 30 in various music
genres. The promotion's purpose was to make students
more familiar with and enthusiastic about each service
as fall classes approached.[19] In the early half
of August, Facebook added universities in Germany
and high schools in Israel, (Haifa, Jerusalem, and
Qiryat Gat) to its network. On the 22nd of that month,
Facebook introduced Facebook Notes, a blogging feature
with tagging, embedded images, and other features,
also allowing the importation of blogs from Xanga,
LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services.
This newly added feature also included the common
blog feature of allowing readers to comment on users'
entries. On September 11, 2006, Facebook became open
to all users of the Internet, prompting protest from
its existing user base.[20] Two weeks later, Facebook
opened registration to anyone with a valid e-mail
address.[21]
2007
On
May 10, 2007, Facebook announced a plan to add free
classified advertisements to its website, making it
a competitor with established online companies such
as Craigslist.[22] This feature, known as Facebook
Marketplace, went live on May 14, 2007; Facebook launched
an API that allows the development of applications
to be used on the site, known as Facebook Platform.[23]
In
June, the partnership begun the previous year between
iTunes and Facebook continued, with the download service
again offering free music samplers through the Apple
Students group.
In
July, Facebook announced its first acquisition, purchasing
Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. In August,
the company was featured in a Newsweek cover story
by Steven Levy in the magazine's annual college edition.[24]
Facebook hired YouTube's former CFO Gideon Yu on July
24, 2007. Gideon Yu succeeded Michael Sheridan.[25]
In
October Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share in the company
for $240 million.[26] An outright sale of Facebook
is said to be unlikely as founder Mark Zuckerberg
would like to keep it independent.[citation needed]
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 ;[27] the capability of businesses
to host pages on Facebook for various brands, products
and services (Facebook Pages); a targeted ad serving
program based on user and friend profile and activity
data (Facebook Social Ads); and a service for providing
businesses with advertisement analytic data including
performance metrics (Facebook Insights). With respect
to privacy, Facebook states that "no personally
identifiable information is shared with an advertiser
in creating a Social Ad," and that "Facebook
users will only see Social Ads to the extent their
friends are sharing information with them".[28]
Facebook Ads replaces the site's previous Facebook
Flyers program.[29] On November 30, 2007, it was reported
that Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing had invested
$60 million in Facebook.[30]
On
5 December 2007, Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized
for the way that Facebook launched the Beacon system,
saying "The problem with our initial approach
of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was
that if someone forgot to decline to share something,
Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends."[31]
Beacon can now be disabled through a new External
websites section in Privacy.[32]
Statistics
(Approximate
numbers as of January 2008)[4]
* Active users: Over 60 million
* Daily new user average: 250,000
* Page views: Over 65 billion per month
* Searches: Over 500 million per month[107]
* Search index size: 200GB
* Largest countries: US, Canada, UK
Remaining top 10 countries in order of active users
(outside of the U.S., Canada and UK): Australia, Turkey,
Sweden, Norway, South Africa, France, Hong Kong.
* Largest networks: London, UK[108]: 2,000,124[109]
and Toronto, Canada: 1,012,604[110]
* Largest United States college networks: Ohio State
University: 72,144[111], University of Minnesota:
72,288[112], Texas A&M University: 76,014[113],
Penn State University: 97,448[114][115]
* Traffic rank: 7th[5]
* Photos: 1.7 billion (which averages to about 44
photos per user)[116]
On
March 2, 2007, a poll conducted by eMarketer.com of
American youths in the United States discovered Facebook
was the most viewed site among all respondents with
more females aged 17-25 (69%) visiting the site than
males (56%).[117]
In
2007, the word "facebook" came in 2nd on
Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year.[118]
In
late 2007, early 2008, disparate youth groups began
referring to Facebook through a variety of nicknames
specific to said group's geography.[citation needed]
One of the earliest such nicknames to catch on was
'facce-book' (fachee-book), as an homage to the accents
of the Portuguese and Italian enclaves in the west
end of Toronto.(Credit: Wikipedia).
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