Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to connect and share content with friends and associates. Facebook is now the largest social network on the internet, with more than 400 million active users, half of whom log on to Facebook in any given day. People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook

A technology from Facebook that allows a reader to log into a third-party website with their Facebook account, rather than creating a new profile for that website. Facebook Connect, which is an API, also allows the third parties to pull certain data from the user’s profile, such as his or her name and age. In turn, the reader’s activities on the website can also be displayed on her or his Facebook profile. Launched in 2007, Facebook Connect was one of the first examples of Facebook extending itself into a platform for the entire Web. (Also see OAuth, Open ID)

A Facebook profile for a specific person, product, company or organization, usually administered by official representatives. This is different from a Facebook personal page, which must be owned by an individual, and different from a Facebook community page, which is built around an interest not related to a brand, such as “cooking.” It is also different from a Facebook group. Fan pages can gather thousands or millions of fans through “likes,” and official posts by the page administrator generally go into the fans’ news streams. Once a page has more than 25 fans, it can claim a short form URL, such as facebook.com/nytimes or facebook.com/wikileaks. Facebook community and fan pages are strong players in ongoing efforts to bring content to people where they already are, instead of requiring them to come to the content.

Facebook groups are analogous to offline clubs. Unlike Facebook fan pages, groups do not have to be administered by official representatives. In addition, the activity posted in groups does not get pushed into users’ feeds. But as long as it has fewer than 5,000 members, Facebook groups are allowed to mass-message all their members.

A profile page tied to a single individual. What information is controlled (in theory) by the individual. However, because there is a 5,000-person limit to friends, some celebrities have fan pages instead. As of 2009, individuals can choose a username, which makes their page available at facebook.com/username.

A free video chat and VOIP software application developed by Apple to run on all devices running iOS, the Apple operating system found on iPhones, iPads, and computers.

When spam filtering systems block the delivery of a legitimate email, this is referred to as a 'false-positive' result.

Favicons are tiny (generally 16×16 pixels, though some are 32×32 pixels), customizable icons displayed in the web address bar in most browsers next to the web address. They’re either 8-bit or 24-bit in color depth and are saved in either .ico, .gif or .png file formats.

First-party data is information collected directly and stored by website publishers, retailers and other types of companies about their site visitors or customers.

A first-time visitor is a visitor who has not been identified as having already been on the site.

A fixed width web page layout has a set width, usually defined in pixels. The width stays the same regardless of screen resolution, monitor size, or browser window size. It allows for minute adjustments to be made to a design that will stay consistent across browsers. Designers have more control over exactly how a site will appear across platforms with this type of layout.

A proprietary platform owned by Adobe Systems that allows for drag-and-drop animations, program interactivity, and dynamic displays for the Web. The language used, ActionScript, is owned by Adobe; this contrasts with many other popular programming languages that are open source. Creators must use Adobe’s Creative Suite products and web surfers must install a Flash plug-in for their browser. Many claim that Flash players are unstable and inefficient, slowing down web pages and crashing operating systems. Apple has not allowed Adobe to create a Flash player for the iPhone operating system, which has created a feud between the two companies. HTML5 is emerging as an open alternative to Flash.

An image and video hosting website popular with bloggers and owned by Yahoo! Forums An online discussion site where registered users can hold conversations in the form of posted messages, or threads.

See Liquid Layout

The focal point of a website is the spot on a web page that the eye is naturally drawn to. This could be an image, a banner, text, Flash content, or just about anything else. It is important to ensure that the focal point is the most important part of the page.

A font family is a group designation for defining the typefaces used in CSS documents. The font family tag generally lists multiple fonts to be used, and usually ends with the generic font category such as “serif” or “sans-serif”.

In CSS, the font style refers solely to whether a font is italic or not.

The font weight refers to how thick or thin (bold or light) a font looks.

Foursquare is a geo-social network where users can “check-in” to places they are visiting, leave tips, add reviews and post pictures. Geo-social works by combining a traditional social networking model of registered users who connect with one another, to GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) technology. By connecting these two models, users don’t just get updates, they also get information about where the updates were made.

A software package that makes writing programs easier by providing all the “plumbing” for a particular type of task (like writing a web app), allowing programmers to just “fill in the blanks” with their own project-specific needs. For instance, Web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails (written in Ruby, meaning programmers use Ruby to do the “fill in the blanks” tasks) and Django (written in Python), have easy-to-use, built-in support for common web development tasks, such as reading and writing to a database, writing content in html, and so forth. Watch Django and Ruby creators discuss the merits of their frameworks on DjangoProject.com.

A pricing strategy where a product or service (typically software) is provided free of charge, but money is charged for additional features, services, or virtual goods.

The front-end is the opposite of the back-end. It is all the components of a website that a visitor to the site can physically see such as pages, images, and other content. More specifically, it is the interface that visitors use to access the website content. It is also sometimes referred to as the User Interface (UI).