Good Morning, dear judges, teachers and friends.

May I take this opportunity here to thank you all, and hereupon extend a further word of welcome to everyone here this morning. We are gathered here in the morning of 4th April to witness, judge and support the participant of the annual public speaking competition. My name is Hamizah binti Maarus and today I would like to give a speech on Facebook. Facebook is phenomenal among children, teenagers and even adults today. How many of you who are gathered here does not have facebook account? One? Two? Or none? Facebook has a long history about how it became a sensation but today I am not going to bore you with its long and uninteresting history instead I am planning to fascinate you all with the interesting facts concerning facebook. Created in 2004 by Mark Elliot Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm room, by 2007 Facebook was reported to have more than 21 million registered members generating 1.6 billion page views each day. The typical user spends about 20 minutes a day on the site, and two-thirds of users log in at least once a day. Today, Facebook is the second most popular site on the World Wide Web. The best aspect that most members attribute to Facebook is its ease of use compared to other social networks .Facebook caters to various needs of individuals, every niche group of individual looks at Facebook with a different outlook as to its advantages and disadvantages. For example, for internet marketers, Facebook is a means of advertising while for a group of students, it a good means of sending messages and announcements back and forth. The strength of Facebook lies in its flexibility of use that allows almost all means of effective communication efficient. The online social network application, Facebook, enables its users to present themselves in an online profile, accumulate friends who can post comments on each others pages, and view each others profiles. Facebook members can also join virtual groups based on common interests, see what classes they have in common, and learn each others hobbies, interests, musical tastes, and romantic relationship status through the profiles. Facebook is overwhelmingly used to keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of offline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class. For many, Facebook provided a way to keep in touch with high school friends and acquaintances. This was demonstrated through the fact that the most commonly included information on users profiles was likely to be relevant for existing acquaintances trying to find them for example their high school. Facebook serves to lower the barriers to participation so that students who might otherwise shy away from initiating communication with or responding to others are encouraged to do so through Facebooks affordances. Facebook use may help to overcome barriers faced by students who have low satisfaction and low self-esteem. Because bridging social capital provides benefits such as increased information and opportunities, we suspect that participants who use Facebook in this way are able to get more out of their college experience. Bonding social capital was also predicted by high self-esteem, satisfaction with university life, and intense Facebook use, although overall, the regression model predicting bonding social capital accounted for less of the variation for this dependent variable than for bridging social capital. Besides that, Facebook also can save us the trouble to remember someones birthday by the birthday feature of Facebook, which prompted us to send birthday greetings to our friends with minimal effort. For students, who have moved away, the ability to stay in touch with their acquaintances may be a valuable sources of new information and resources. Additionally, the ability to stay in touch with these networks may offset feelings of friend sickness, the distress caused by the loss of old friends.

Facebook has affected the social life and activity of people in various ways. With its availability on many mobile devices, Facebook allows users to continuously stay in touch with friends, relatives and other acquaintances wherever they are in the world, as long as there is access to the Internet. It can also unite people with common interests or beliefs through groups and other pages, and has been known to reunite lost family members and friends because of the widespread reach of its network. One such reunion was between John Watson and the daughter he had been seeking for 20 years. They met after Watson found her Facebook profile.Another father-daughter reunion was between Tony Macnauton and Frances Simpson, who had not seen each other for nearly 48 years. Facebook is also an efficient and effective means of advertising since it costs almost nothing but reaches the world at large. Although there are varied expressions of the number of members on Facebook, the number could be anywhere between 60 million to 80 million as per data dating to November 2008. Facebook is only growing by the day and it would not be surprising if it has already crossed the 100 million mark. Amazing, isnt it? Can a business imagine the possibilities of its advert getting an exposure to this large mass of people? Again, Facebook comes up tops here with member comfort by not displaying advertisements all over the pages. It displays them on the top-right corner of the home page and in the column on the right in the internal pages. This ensures that the adverts get good coverage and at the same time do not stick out like a sore thumb for a member. The effectiveness of advertising on Facebook is already proven and many businesses are making a beeline to Facebook all the time. Facebook is an informal interactive website and does not seem so serious for many but legal professionals have a different take of it. A prime example here is the case of the University of Pennsylvania where officials claimed that they had tracked down the identities of students who bombarded the field in the October 2005 Ohio state game. Facebook is also known to be used by the police to track down students violating the moral codes or standards of colleges and even culprits who are at large. One of Facebooks greatest strengths, the photo sharing feature is a great advantage for many. Photos can be uploaded to Facebook with ease and this can be achieved directly from a mobile phone too. The user can organize the photos into albums and set restrictions as to who can see the photos and who cannot. This Facebook has largely contributed to the popularity of this social networking medium and has eased the cause of members to a great extent. If such a feature were not available, members would have to send multiple emails with attachments to their friends and relatives or snail mail prints. The photo sharing feature also features a comment which is very innovative method of conversing with pictures. Facebook by large has a lot of advantages over other social networking media which have contributed to its success. Its aesthetic feel is also one of its strengths and as mentioned before, everyone has a different take to Facebook and uses it to their own specific advantages. This flexibility of use that Facebook offers makes it highly customizable for professionals as well as personal use making it one of the best communication mediums available today.