Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 2004, owned and operated by Facebook It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Azel[disambiguation needed], Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States,corporations,and by September 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.
On October 1, 2005, Facebook expanded to twenty-one universities in the United Kingdom, the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) system in Mexico (around thirty campuses throughout the country at the time), the University of Puerto Rico and Interamerican University of Puerto Rico network in Puerto Rico, and the University of the Virgin Islands network in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step.[40] At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. On December 11, 2005, universities in Australia and New Zealand were added to the Facebook network, bringing its size to 2,000+ colleges and 25,000 + high schools throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006 to everyone ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address.
Late in 2007, Facebook had 100,000 business pages, allowing companies to attract potential customers and tell about themselves. These started as group pages, but a new concept called company pages was planned.
In October 2008, Facebook announced that it would set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland.
In 2010, Facebook began to invite users to become beta testers after passing a question-and-answer-based selection process, and a set of Facebook Engineering Puzzles where users would solve computational problems which gave them an opportunity to be hired by Facebook.
As of February 2011, Facebook had become the largest online photo host, being cited by Facebook application and online photo aggregator Pixable as expecting to have 100 billion photos by summer 2011. As of October 2011, over 350 million users accessed Facebook through their mobile phones, accounting for 33% of all Facebook traffic.
On March 12, 2012, Yahoo! filed suit in a U.S. federal court against Facebook weeks before the scheduled Facebook initial public offering. In its court filing, Yahoo said that Facebook had infringed on ten of its patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking. Yahoo had threatened to sue Facebook a month before the filing, insisting that the social network license its patents. A spokesperson for Facebook issued a statement saying "We're disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation". The lawsuit claims that Yahoo's patents cover basic social networking ideas such as customizing website users' experiences to their needs, adding that the patents cover ways of targeting ads to individual users.