Long before FB became a social networking site used by people worldwide, it was a Harvard student directory. It had the name “The facebook” and contained student photos and profiles. The site was renamed in 2005 and made open to outside users.

Here are some very interesting facts about FB:

• Co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel was the first person to invest in Facebook. It was in 2004, and he had invested $500,000.

• A survey conducted had revealed that around 57% of Facebook users who are parents with children below the age of 18 strongly dislike it when others post pictures of their children without permission.

• Almost half of all FB users who are an adult have more than 200 people on their friend list while 39% of users have between 1-100 Facebook friends. Almost 15% people have more than 500 friends on FB.

• Liking and commenting are the most commonly engaged activities by users on FB, far more than updating statuses. 44% of FB users ‘like’ different kinds of content that are posted on at least once a day while 29% admit to doing this multiple times.

• In 2009, the Oxford Dictionary announced its word of the year being “unfriend” and defined it as the act of removing someone as a friend on a social networking site such as Facebook.

• An average FB user spends over 55 minutes daily on the social networking site.

• Outside US FB users account for 70% of the total number of users on FB.

• At present there are more than 800,000 developers who are found to be developing various kinds of applications for Facebook.

• The original Facebook page contained Al Pacino’s face on it and partly obscured by a series of binary codes.

• One of the earliest and only available services on FB was FB’s file sharing service.

• Farmville, one of the most popularly played games on FB boasts of over 60 million players while its maker, Zynga generates annual revenue of $200million.

• 54% of US residents aged between 13 and 17 are Facebook users.

• Despite most users having hundreds of friends, an average FB user does not interact with more than 4-7 people on a regular basis.

• About 80% of divorce lawyers have reported an increase in splits owing to the use of social media; approximately 1 in 5 divorces are estimated to be caused by FB. The survey was conducted by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.

• US psychologists have introduced the term FAD or Facebook Addiction Disorder and an estimated 350 million users suffer from FAD affecting their daily lives through loss of productivity, depression, isolation, inability to concentrate etc.

• In 2009 Burger King launched an advertising campaign claiming to offer a free “Angry Whopper” to all those who would publicly delete 10 friends from their list and willing to receive a blunt message that they were deleted for the free burger.

• Founder of FB, Mark Zuckerberg suffers from red-green colour blindness. He sees blue colour the best. That explains why Facebook has a predominantly blue colour scheme.

Facebook like the Internet is a great innovation in the field of technology. Today more than a medium to stay in touch with friends, it has become a social media where one can make entrepreneurial ventures and popularise their business, create mass awareness and much more.