What your favourite Web sites say about you

By Rory Reid on 10 September 2007, 5:27pm

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FACEBOOK
What's the story?
'The Facebook' was founded in February 2004 by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, with support from friends Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin. The site was inspired by traditional paper facebooks -- university publications distributed at the start of the academic year to help students get to know each other.

Membership was originally restricted to Harvard students but the site slowly opened its doors to anyone with a US college or university email address (.edu). It later dropped all restrictions, allowing anybody with Internet access to sign up.

In May 2005, the company raised $12.7m in venture capital and later bought the domain name facebook.com from Aboutface Corporation for $200,000. It then dropped 'the' from its name, sat back and watched the masses flood in. By December 2005, Facebook had attracted as many as 11 million users.

Did you know?
It is possible to increase the size of user photos that are shown during a people search. All you need to do is alter a URL parameter. Right click your image of choice, copy the image location, paste it into a browser address bar and alter the 's' in the filename to an 'n'. Now you can stalk strangers without straining your eyesight!

What Facebook says about you
The typical Facebookers are what you'd get if YouTube and Flickr went halves on a baby. Yes, the site was created to help university students connect and have a good time, but connecting and having a good time generally involves unruly, drunken behaviour, which is inevitably caught on film and posted for your entire friends list to see.

Most Facebookers have mastered the skill of anonymous stalking. They're loathe to admit it, but they'll happily waste hours peering into the lives of people they hardly know, assimilating every last piece of personal information they can -- particularly if their victim is good looking.

To them, Facebook is the equivalent of breaking into somebody's home while they're away, reading their diary, trying on their underwear and (through the Facebook wall) scrawling graffiti everywhere.