Facebook Turns 17, Celebrates It With a Custom Animation About Friendship

Facebook turns 17 at present, February 4, and is celebrating its annual milestone “Friends Day” with a customized animation wordmark that speaks of friendship and inclusion. The animation reveals a girl sporting a scarf and a younger boy connecting through Facebook and exchanging messages, loaded with pleasant emoji, to indicate the size and breadth of the social media firm’s success within the final 17 years. The big that Facebook is at present began as a school community for Harvard University college students in 2004 by a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, alongside along with his school mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. Most of this story was explored within the film The Social Network, however within the years since, the corporate had grown to be virtually omnipresent; with a number of fashionable companies together with WhatsApp and Instagram, and has drawn big criticism for spreading misinformation and hate, other than its acknowledged mission of connecting folks.

Facebook at present has an estimated 2.6 billion month-to-month energetic customers worldwide with over 241 million customers in India. Over the years, it has created and purchased a host of services and products, together with Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus which have turned it into a social media conglomerate catering to a rising on-line inhabitants. WhatsApp, for example, has an estimated 1.5 billion customers on this planet with over 400 million in India alone. Instagram has over 800 million customers worldwide.

Along the way in which, the corporate has additionally gotten into a lot of controversy. Most not too long ago, a WhatsApp privateness coverage replace talked about sharing person knowledge with Facebook’s different services and products spiralled into a controversy. Facebook can be at the moment locked in a battle with the Australian authorities over paying media shops for the information that drives visitors to its platforms.

But the most important controversy surrounding Facebook thus far has been the Cambridge Analytica scandal that had Zuckerberg depose earlier than the US Parliament to clarify how person knowledge of 87 million Facebook customers might be mined for political promoting. The US regulators not too long ago settled the info privateness scandal with Facebook after imposing a effective of $5 billion (roughly Rs. 38,159 crores).

At 17 years of age, Facebook may be stated to be on the cusp of maturity. With Amazon boss Jeff Bezos stepping out of the CEO’s chair, and Google’s founders additionally not actively concerned within the day-to-day choices of the corporate anymore, Zuckerberg is without doubt one of the few huge tech founders of the early 2000s nonetheless within the scorching seat.

Earlier on Thursday it held a assembly to debate its insurance policies on misinformation, and it continues to develop at a speedy clip, and is at present one of many greatest gamers in what might be the way forward for expertise — digital actuality.

Does WhatsApp’s new privateness coverage spell the tip to your privateness? We mentioned this on Orbital, our weekly expertise podcast, which you’ll be able to subscribe to through Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, obtain the episode, or simply hit the play button beneath.