Facebook Goes Public
The average person spends about 45 minutes a day using social networking websites and today one of the worlds most successful social networking websites, Facebook, filed paper work to become a publicly traded company February 1 with an IPO (initial public offering) of $5 billion.
December 31, Facebook said that it had over 845 million active users with 483 million people around the world logging on each day. After bringing in $3.75 billion in revenue in 2011 Facebook is ready to be a publicly traded company.
Along with Facebook’s announcement of going public it was discovered that 12% of Facebooks profits come from a company called Zynga. Zynga is a company that makes Facebook games such as “Farmville.” Zynga also recently announced it is trying to find new ways to be independent of Facebook for the future.
As of lately Facebook’s growth, as far as users, has been gradually declining. In order to cause hype the CEO and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is claiming that Facebook is more than just about the money but that it will lead to World Revolutions.
“We believe that leaders will emerge across all of the countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them,” Zuckerberg said.
Although social networking has been a tool in many uprisings across the world such as Lybia and Egypt, Facebook has not done very much to help. Other companies such as Google and Twitter have actively tried to give internet access to people who were being denied that right by oppressive regimes. In regards to Egypt, Facebook gave a very neutral opinion, without any action to back it up.
“Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter of the Egyptian people and their government to resolve limiting internet access for millions of people, it is a matter of concern for the global community.”
In the last couple of weeks Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the people at Facebook have made some bold moves. Between making their company available for public trade and releasing powerful statements about Facebook’s involvement in the political development of other countries, it goes without saying that the near future for Facebook will be quite intriguing.
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