The Journey to Facebook HQ

And Saadia Qamar’s journey to the Social Networking Hubs continues… This week, her 4th stop is Palo Alto, San Francisco, California!

For Facebook lovers, or those who have marveled and played on with this intricate way of networking and public dealing know for sure, that it is suppose to be one of coolest website to visit and connect, but it is much more than that, when you actually drop in at the Head Quarters located at Palo Alto, one of the most expensive towns in the United States.

Barry Schnitt speaking to the international community of journalists

At Facebook Head Quarters meeting up with Barry Schnitt, Director Policy Communications at Facebook asserted, that Facebook was the actual thing that was being used 70 percent outside of the United States. Its basic aim remains to, “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

In the brief introduction that we had, Schnitt informed us that the four people at Harvard came up with the idea of Facebook and initially it was only meant for college students; but with the passage of time, it got fully developed, into something for everyone, open registration took less than 4 years and by 2008 it became very global.

Today, Facebook users can use any language to get connected and network around, in March 2009 this year another great option is available which is The Stream.

So behind the philosophy of “ power of sharing”, the tools that are used are Connect, Stream and Graph.

Schnitt, informed the international media community, that as many as 120 million users login daily, 2.5 million events are created each month, more than 30 million users update their profile page every day and over a billion sent out chat messages to their friends.

On an average, one facebook user has as many as 130 friends on his profile page and interestingly if you are not the addictive kind then you sit around 7 months of your ife having wisely been dedicated to the use of Facebook !!

Journalists hanging out at the Facebook HQ.

So how does Facebook make money, since they strongly believe not to charge their users ever, advertising remains the primary source of money making. The Facebook team strongly believes in rights and responsibility of ownership and has strong undercurrents attached to the fact that privacy is one thing that can’t be negotiated on. Schnitt says, “People share and connect more, when they have control over their privacy.”

But why does the website itself gets changed with a new face on its wall, I inquire?? More often than not, according to Schnitt; “the policy remains to make it better, the site to be more usable, for others.”

So the baby of Mark Zuckerberg, is definitely the most “in” thing around the world. Stay connected and Network more often.