1.1 Background Facebook is a social networking site which was launched on February 2004 “by some college students Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes as a site for Harvard students. Shortly after, it expanded to any college student with an .edu e-mail account. Between Fall 2005 and Fall 2006, Facebook expanded to high school networks, first, work networks, later, and, eventually, to Internet users in general.” (Valenzuela, Park, & F. Kee, K, 2008. p. 5). Nowadays, Facebook is the most effective means of communication. Similar to other social networking websites people their own account of Facebook where they give their personal information like gender, birth date, hometown, religion, political views, contact numbers, activities, interest, relationship status and profile pictures. After completing their profile users add their friends, family, colleagues or random people whom they would like to be friends with to their friend list. (Valenzuela, Park, & k F. Kee, 2008. p. 6). Through Facebook people who have never met each other in person can communicate and make new relationships and friendships. It is just another element of society that is interested in sharing information with the intimacy of a close, personal relationship. (Marklein, 2009). As of today, Facebook has 564,121,840, global members, including myself. Facebook has also become very popular in Bangladesh. As we are moving towards Digital Bangladesh many people has access to internet from their PC or their cell phones. The Bangladeshi people started using Facebook since the middle of 2007 and now on 2010 there are 995, 560 active users on Facebook. Among them most of the users are the young people who spend lots of time on Facebook. And this research is mainly on the impacts of Facebook on people of Bangladeshi society and Bangladeshi people, especially the youth.
Rationalization In a study at Ohio State University showed that the students who used