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Social media permit virtual face-to-face meetings every day, says David Meerman Scott, a marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly. “I like to tell salespeople to think of the Web as a huge city teeming with individuals, and blogs and other social media information as the sounds of independent voices,” he says.

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.,[1] with more than 500 million[5] active users in July 2010, which is about one person for every fourteen in the world.[6][N 1] Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.[7] 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 Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over.

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[16] Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade 'best-of' list, saying, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"