What is facebook?

-A reference book or electronic directory made up of individuals’ photographs and names; A college publication distributed at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better; To communicate through the Internet.
-Facebook is a social networking site that allows for developers to contribute applications that interact with Facebook features. GoGrid offers a Facebook Server Image that allows Facebook developers to contribute their applications through GoGrid servers directly to Facebook's development network.

Advantages and Disadvantages of facebook?

Yet there are some people who wonder if the time spent on Facebook is worthwhile, its Advantages and Disadvantages have many thinking. As with every system there are the positives and the negatives, if you are going to evaluate the Facebook Advantages and Disadvantages lets take a look at some facts:

Disadvantages:

• Facebook is becoming a place for long distance relationships with many people you will never meet, this takes some of the intimacy away from relationships
• Facebook addiction is becoming something that is a real problem; if you have any life at all you have other things to do besides sit on Facebook all day.
• Because of open and public nature of Facebook there is the possibility for being stalked online or offline, this can be highly aggravating!
• Terrible for worker productivity. If you are self employed Facebook can consume much of your time if you are not careful. If you run a business your employees may waste valuable and expensive time using Facebook.
• Let's talk about these people on Facebook who are labeled "friends"...are they really?

Advantages:

· Facebook makes it easy to find and join groups with similar interest and dislikes

· It is easier to find old friends or new friends as almost everyone is on Facebook.

· Facebook makes it easy to approach and meet new people

· Facebook can be used to meet business contacts and for networking purposes

· Allows user search for new and old friends
· Accessible to chosen universities having a high level of security
· Makes it less awkward when communicating with strangers or people you are not familiar with
· Love attraction - can be used as a dating service system
· Makes it easier to join groups having similar likes and dislikes
· Allows members to check students who are taking the same class, living within the same area,

What are the characteristics of facebook?Why are many people engage in this site?

They are non-interruptive – Think about all the times you have non-marketing oriented folks tell you why they are on Facebook.

They don’t strive for 1:1 communication, but they are active – Anyone who has worked in a social media program can attest to the fact that social media users have a keen eye for BS (for lack of a better expression). the relationship with the entire user base.

They use Facebook to create evangelists – Badges, apps, fanpages…all of these things are ways to turn your existing base into your own built in brand evangelizing army.

Facebook doesn’t begin the conversation, it enhances it – If you’re a new or low profile brand looking to increase awareness, Facebook can be a great way to do it.

-People engage this site to have many friends,and other people create thier facebook beacuse they dont want to behind in thier friends.

Can you use facebook in e-commerce?How and Why?

- Yes you can used e-commerce in facebook beacuse you can sale your product to your friends in facebook by chatting and e-mail them about your product.

How important facebook in our society today?

Facebook is impotant today beacuse it is the one of the top social networking sites, quickly gaining on Myspace in terms of total users and traffic. Facebook presents a unique marketing opportunity for businesses through the creation of Facebook Business Pages. As more people explore social media, social networking sites have become some of the key online sources they use to learn more about products, organizations, artists and world events. Marketing on Facebook has a viral effect – information spreads through networks exponentially.

Questions

1. Who are their competitors?

Answer:The competitors of google are the yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp; and specialty search engines that dive deep into a specific category, such as travel site Kayak and health inquiry site WebMD.

(c) 2010, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

2. How have they use information technology to their advantage?

Answer: In information technology and on the Internet, infrastructure is the physical hardware used to interconnect computers and users. Infrastructure includes the transmission media, including telephone lines, cable television lines, and satellites and antennas, and also the routers,aggregators, repeaters, and other devices that control transmission paths. Infrastructure also includes the software used to send, receive, and manage the signals that are transmitted.In some usages, infrastructure refers to interconnecting hardware and software and not to computers and other devices that are interconnected. However, to some information technology users, infrastructure is viewed as everything that supports the flow and processing of information.Infrastructure companies play a significant part in evolving the Internet, both in terms of where the interrconnections are placed and made accessible and in terms of how much information can be carried how quickly.

By Stacey Higginbotham Mar. 17, 2010, 7:50am PDT 2 Comments

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3. How competitive are they in the market?

Answer:Google are competitive in the market because Google’s stock at USD500 mark, this is good news to all Adsense publisher especially those that is making a living from Google Adsense. Google is using the Web as an operating system by offering free Rich Internet Applications. I have been using Google Doc and Spreadsheets, the only drawback is the internet connection. It would be nice if Google provide a lite edition for installation.Google surged to $131.9 billion when its shares rose 3.7 percent to $446.21 on the news, topping IBM's market cap of $131 billion. Google shares closed down 1.3 percent. At day's end, IBM was worth $130.7 billion and Google had fallen to $125.5 billion. Google's shares have more than doubled since Jan. 1 on analysts' expectations that profit will rise four-fold to $1.62 billion this year. IBM shares have declined 15 percent on estimates of 11 percent profit growth and a 4 percent sales drop. A stake in AOL would help Google, the world's most-used search engine, fend off competition from Microsoft Corp.'s MSN search.

4. What new services do they offer?

Answer:This list of Google products includes all major desktop, mobile and online products released or acquired by Google Inc. They are either a gold release, in beta development, or part of the Google Labs initiative. This list also includes previous products, that have either been merged, discarded or renamed. Features of products, such as Web Search features, are not listed.

Google Products offers

Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics

Google Chrome A browser built for speed, stability and security

Directory Search the web, organized by topic or category

Images Search for images on the web

News Search thousands of news stories

Scholar Search scholarly papers

Web Search Search billions of web pages

5. What makes them so unique?

answer: Google, at the moment, is held up as the gold standard of software companies. They have achieved massive success and are the company almost every developer wants to work for. Ask someone in the software industry which company they want to emulate and they will likely say Google.Obviously, if it was easy to emulate Google, everyone would have done it or would be doing it by now. The more I think about Google, the more and more I think it is going to be impossible to emulate them. Certainly you can steal some of their ideas and what they’ve pioneered and put it to use in your company, but outright copying Google is going to be near impossible.Having touched on Google’s corporate culture, let’s look at something else that makes Google even more unique: how it grows.One thing that has become evident to me is that Google grows in an organic fashion, unlike any other company I know of. Google develops tools that are internally useful and then releases them to the world. Google does not develop products to sell to the world. Google does not have external contracts, at least in the traditional sense, as far as I can tell.Let me elaborate on this. Google is obviously best known for search and for ads associated with search. This is in essence Google’s one true product. It is the one feature Google developed for the outside world. When Google developed search it was no different from a small company. It is what Google has done since then that makes Google different.Mark Mzyk

6. How competitive are they in the international?

answer: Google are very compititive beacuse it is friendly user software program and easy to access. Though marketers know which keywords drove traffic to their websites, they may not know how much traffic was sent to the competition for the same keywords. In this example, 30% people searching for bestbuy have also landed at walmart.com. Google says the data is collected from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. Funny thing is Google itself opted out. In addition to what is provided in Google Website Trends, here we also get Country Reach metric which they had also talked about a quicker solution to calculate country reach last year. Ad Planner has ways to drill-down the sites by demographics. This is a great tool to select sites to advertise on and even to know the demographics of our own site.

Case#1

Case#1

Google is a highly successful internet business. Recently they have broadened their scope with a multitude of new tools.

Research google business model and answer the following questions below. You may add additional information not included in this question