Facebook, as of July 2011, had more than 800 million active users. Facebook is now the world’s largest advertising and marketing platform, far exceeding Google and Twitter.

Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers.

The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections.

Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.

Facebook users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information, and other personal information. Users can communicate with friends and other users through private or public messages and via a chat feature.

They can also create and join interest groups and “like pages” (called “fan pages”), a lot of which are run and maintained by businesses or organizations as a means of advertising, to reach targeted markets.