By Elvis Wong

How many people actually remember the pre-historic times of Xanga, the first free, public and personalized blogging website available? Launched in 1998, Xanga members were introduced to a new experience on the Internet. For the first time, people were given the liberty of creating their own weblogs, photoblogs, and audioblogs. Xanga gave birth to extensive online interaction.
What do you think of when you hear about Facebook? Poke wars. Status updates. Wall posts. Friend requests. Photo and video uploads. FarmVille. “Liking” Pages. Joining Groups. Any of these sound familiar to you? I’m sure that they do.
Facebook, perhaps the world’s most famous social networking website, has about 500 million monthly users, accounting for one in every 14 people around the world.
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives as it continues to grow in importance. In our ever-expanding society today, joining Facebook is a crucial and expedient way to connect with friends, classmates, co-workers, old high school friends, and even relatives. Facebook serves as a mass media resource conveniently accessible to everyone; people can upload photo albums and videos, write blogs, play games, join groups, and reconnect with others.
Mark Zuckerberg, while a sophomore at Harvard College in 2004, co-founded the national student network phenomenon, originally called thefacebook, along with his classmates Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes. Months after the concept of Facebook was created, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams of running the website full-time. Now the president and CEO of Facebook, Zuckerberg is one of the youngest billionaires in America—talk about the American Dream at its finest.
Although some people may say that Facebook is a modern-day, life-sucking, time-wasting abomination, it is a great resource which is readily available on the Internet. By developing a comprehensive system of connections interwoven into a web-based network, people can efficiently access information about television programs, celebrities, politics, and much more; in fact, Facebook also serves as an outlet for the most current news stories as status updates posted on walls can spread to others quickly. People have suddenly become more aware and conscientious of society as the events that are happening in the community reach the newsfeeds of Facebook.
In today’s generation, with the constantly increasing technological innovations paralleled by the perennial desire for technological conveniences, Facebook’s complex structure for social networking has rendered a new medium of communication.