The worlds largest social networking website, Face book has come to define contemporary social communication in the digital world.The exceptional popularity of this social networking site(sns) in tricky cyber terrain is evident from the fact that the number of its active users has crossed 500 million. If the face book were a country, it would be the third most populous in the world, behind china and India. Two other social network sites MySpace (300) million and Twitter (124million) would occupy the fith and eight slots, pointing to the magnitude of the revolution in cyberspace. The key to understanding the success of Face book is that it rode on what social media theorist Clay Shirky characterises as the ability of the Internet to transform the manner in which information is created, shared, and distributed. The ease with which users can air their views and moods is an empowering attribute that prompts a global clientele to sign up.
The SNS revolution started in 1997, and Facebook was not among the poineers. Between 1997-2004, when Mark Zuckerberg launched the facebook.com as a site to share with his fellow Harvard students, many such sites came into being.
Face book effectiveness is in its user friendly approach behind which lies the application of cutting edge Internet technologies to serve a basic urge: the quest for information, .It also ties in with contemporary knowledge society, marked by the ability of individuals quickly to create, package and share content around the world. Mr. Zuckerber’gs success is also linked to an innovation by which the site opened itself to other developers, thereby building a network of applications that piggyback on, and bring in users to the site.
