Facebook was launched in February, 2004 and was founded by Mark Zuckerberg along with his friends Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. They were all students of Harvard University, and initially launched Facebook just as a means of keeping in touch with other students from their batch.
The response was so overwhelming, that they had to expand the service limitlessly, and today Facebook has over 400 million users all over the world.
Today when we sign up with Facebook, we can perform a plethora of tasks on the interface there, and it will not be surprising to find that in the years to come, all our online activities will be directed from Facebook itself.
When compared to its direct competitors in the social networking market, Facebook wins over other social networking sites including MySpace, Twitter and Orkut.