Facebook is a major player among the emerging social networking sites on the net. Online users register to have a Facebook account where they can “socialize” with a listing of friends with whom messages can be exchanged between and among them. You get to your group and your friends’ profiles and they get notified accordingly.
Origins
The name facebook takes off from the popular book name distributed by Harvard University administrators to incoming freshmen to help them get to know each other with information about them. Mark Zuckerberg founded the site with the help of college pals and fellow computer science students at the Harvard University.
Facebook was initially confined to Harvard students. It later became so popular that it expanded to include other Ivy League colleges in Boston. Its popularity went beyond Boston to include any college student and finally became open to all students from 13 years of age. Facebook now has more than 300 million active social networkers worldwide.
Features
Facebook is often compared with a similar social networking site MySpace. The latter offers more flexibility to have user sites customized using HTML and cascading style sheets or CSS. Facebook only allows plain text. But that didn’t prevent it from becoming one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet.
It has enough features to make the users content. There’s the Wall feature that provides enough space on user site where friends can post messages for anyone to see. It can now allow attachments to it whereas you only get to post text messages before. Status is a feature announcing to your online friends your whereabouts and happenings. Photos allow you to upload albums and pictures. This is the most popular feature on the Facebook site.
The site continues to evolve to make it as response as possible. Facebook, along with other social networking sites like Twitter also took on a more commercial appeal as company executives and politicians use it for business and political purposes.
Vodafone Offers Free Access to Facebook
Vodafone recenty announced a new promotion giving free access to Facebook for subscribers who use their mobile broadband services. This and other premium promotions are part of Vodafone’s renewed effort to increase its mobile broadband subscriber base and extend their market influence.
Coined as the Free Friday series, these promotions were launched last and started with offers of unlimited mobile internet access for a flat rate of 50p per day. Vodafone also included premium access to digital rights management free music on free music Friday. This new campaign involving Facebook, along with their other programs are targeted at today’s youth.
Vodaphone’s new marketing campaign is aimed at creating a youthful mobile internet base to maximize their existing mobile communications network. New technologies acquired by Vodafone has enabled them to offer mobile broadband to most of their coverage areas and in the major population centers.
The free Facebook service is available to subscribers using their laptop or home pc with Vodafone’s mobile broadband service and through Vodafone’s mobile phones. The data counters used by Vodafone will stop moving when visiting the Facebook website and resume counting when moving out of them. The regular pay as you go rates or the standard 50p per day rates will apply when visiting non Facebook websites.
Other than this Facebook access time, Vodafone is also offering a Facebook alert service that will enable users to receive updates on their profile pages. This ranges from wall alerts, status updates, pokebacks and other alerts on facebook. The updates will be sent through SMS or text messaging. Users may also reply to these alerts to and standard text messaging rates apply.
