If you block someone in Facebook, will that person be notified?

[The Phlebob]

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.[1] Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University.[5] The website's membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 350 million active users worldwide.[6]

Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria,[7] China,[8] Vietnam,[9] and Iran.[10] It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.[11] Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property.[12] The site has also been involved in controversy over the sale of fans and friends.[13]

A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.[14]

There has recently been reports of Facebook proposing an initial public offering (IPO), i.e. issue equity shares in the form of stock to investors. However, Zuckerberg stresses that it will not be for a few more years, and the company is in no need of additional capital.[15][16] Also, some analysts fear the Facebook IPO might be a particularly weak one.[17]
Contents
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* 1 History
o 1.1 Facemash
o 1.2 Thefacebook
* 2 Financials
* 3 Website
o 3.1 Interface evolution
+ 3.1.1 Facebook Lite
o 3.2 Features
o 3.3 Platform
o 3.4 iPhone app
o 3.5 Facebook on other devices
o 3.6 Server infrastructure
o 3.7 Downtime and outages
o 3.8 URL shortener
* 4 Reception
o 4.1 Use by courts
o 4.2 Criticism
+ 4.2.1 Children under 13
+ 4.2.2 First local cases
+ 4.2.3 Banned by governments
# 4.2.3.1 Africa and Middle East
# 4.2.3.2 Far East
+ 4.2.4 Beacon
+ 4.2.5 Privacy
+ 4.2.6 Teen suicide and relationships
+ 4.2.7 Pro-mafia groups' case
+ 4.2.8 Phishing
+ 4.2.9 Holocaust denial groups
o 4.3 Lamebook
* 5 Controversy
o 5.1 uSocial
* 6 Litigation
o 6.1 ConnectU
o 6.2 StudiVZ
o 6.3 Grant Raphael
o 6.4 Adam Guerbuez
o 6.5 Alessandro Del Piero
o 6.6 Jack Thompson
* 7 See also
* 8 References
* 9 External links

History
Facemash
Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room.

Mark Zuckerberg invented Facemash on October 28, 2003 while attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not, according to the Harvard Crimson.[18] That night, Zuckerberg was blogging about a girl who had dumped him and trying to think of something to do to get her off his mind:[19][20][21]

I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.
—9:48 pm

Yea, it's on. I'm not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can't really ever be sure with farm animals...), but I like the idea of comparing two people together.
—11:09 pm

Let the hacking begin.
—12:58 am

According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash "used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person." To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard's computer network and copied the houses' private dormitory ID images.

Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos and basic information and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in i