Facebook Goes Ten

Facebook plans on celebrating its 10th birthday today, an occasion likely to spur an outpouring of reflection on its past and speculation about its future.

Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” from his dorm room at Harvard University on Feb. 4, 2004. The site was conceived as a way to connect students, and let them build an online identity for themselves.

It has since expanded to cover a large swath of the planet, with more than 1.2 billion people — one-seventh of the world’s population — using its site on a monthly basis, according to the company’s own recent figures.

Zuckerberg reflected on the 10-year milestone at an industry conference in Silicon Valley this week. Not surprisingly, at the start he never envisioned Facebook becoming so large or influential. After launching the initial version, “it was awesome to have this utility and community at our school,” he said at the Open Compute Project Summit.

He figured at the time that someone, someday would build such a site for the world. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be us,” he said.

Since then, Facebook’s site and its business, now a public company, have changed dramatically. There are now more than a trillion status updates, text posts and other pieces of content stored within its walls — the company is trying to index them as part of its Graph Search search engine.

The company was slow to react to the important mobile market, and when it went public in 2012 investors were skeptical it would be able to monetize its service on smaller screens. But this week it reported that more than half its ad revenue now comes from mobile devices.

All the while, Facebook is making its ad business smarter, using targeting tools to show ads it deems most relevant.

The company is also experimenting with new ways to present content. Next week it will release Paper, an iPhone app that provides a new way to share photos and published articles.

It’s part of a larger effort Facebook hinted at this week to release a variety of standalone apps for different tasks.

The company is also trying to bring the Internet to more people in the world, an effort that’s part philanthropy and part business sense as Facebook aims to reach its next billion users. Asked this week why he launched the project, called Internet.org, Zuckerberg suggested he feels a weight of responsibility.

“There aren’t that many companies in the world that have the resources and the reach that Facebook has at this point,” he said.

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Researchers Build Flying Robot

Researchers say they have assembled a flying robot. It’s not designed to fly like a bird or an insect, but was built to simulate the movements of a swimming jellyfish.

Scientists at New York University say they built the small, flying vehicle to move like the boneless, pulsating, water-dwelling jellyfish.

Leif Ristroph, a post-doctoral student at NYU and a lead researcher on the project, explained that previous flying robots were based on the flight of birds or insects, such as flies.

Last spring, for example, Harvard University researchers announced that they had built an insect-like robot that flies by flapping its wings. The flying robot is so small it has about 1/30th the weight of a U.S. penny.

Before the Harvard work was announced, researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Sussex in England worked together to study thebrains of honey bees in an attempt to build an autonomous flying robot.

By creating models of the systems in a bee’s brain that control vision and sense of smell, scientists hope to build a robot that would be able to sense and act as autonomously as a bee.

The problem with those designs, though, is that the flapping wing of a fly is inherently unstable, Ristroph noted.

“To stay in flight and to maneuver, a fly must constantly monitor its environment to sense every gust of wind or approaching predator, adjusting its flying motion to respond within fractions of a second,” Ristroph said. “To recreate that sort of complex control in a mechanical device — and to squeeze it into a small robotic frame — is extremely difficult.”

To get beyond those challenges, Ristroph built a prototype robot that is 8 centimeters wide and weighs two grams. The robot flies by flapping four wings arranged like petals on a flower that pulsate up and down, resembling the flying motion of a moth.

The machine, according to NYU, can hover and fly in a particular direction.

There is more work still to be done. Ristroph reported that his prototype doesn’t have a battery but is attached to an external power source. It also can’t steer, either autonomously or via remote control.

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