When three Harvard University students, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes designed an developed their little inter-university project, called Facebook, little did they know that, in a span of four years, their initiative will become one of the most cherished and powerful social networks on the Internet, that would cater to more than 500 million users. Ever since its inception in the year 2006, Facebook has been known to be one of the foremost platforms through which users are able to connect with current and past friends and family members and share their lives with them.

With the rapid expansion of Facebook, the company has in fact been continuously striving to make users more comfortable and at the same time, explore new venues of revenue generation. To accomplish both tasks simultaneously, Facebook has been frequently incorporating new features and business related guidelines. Here is our list of the Top Ten initiatives taken by Facebook so far.

• Introduction of ‘Open Graph’: Facebook has now incorporated a new feature called, Open Graph API, with the help of which, Facebook intends to bring corporate entities, websites and services closer to the social networking behemoth. All the sites that would use the this new API, will then able to realistically use many of the Facebook features, for themselves and thus in a manner connecting themselves to Facebook.

• Implementation of the ‘Like button across the web: During the much hyped F8 conference, Facebook announced the launch of the highly anticipated ‘Like’ button for the entire web. Facebook has already gathered partners in the form of big hitters including CNN, ESPN, and IMDb, where these services will now be displaying the ‘Like’ button on top of the stories.

• Introduction of Facebook Insight Analytics service: With the host of new features rolled out by the company at the F8 conference, the company is now also focusing on the users who create their own pages and place social advertisements as well as the websites that will implement Facebook’s new features Facebook has now rolled out the all new Insight Analytics service, with which the company plans to provide the users with information about the visitors who share the content from the users’ websites.

• Facebook now lightning its grip on user privacy: It seems that Facebook has begun loosening its grip on user privacy and given into the demands of its affiliated websites and services. At the F8 conference, Facebook has now announced that, the company will not longer be asking its affiliated services, with whom it shares user data, to relinquish the data within 24 hours. Instead, Facebook will now allow these service to retain the user data they acquire from Facebook.

• A Microsoft style office suite for Facebook: Facebook has now got an all new office suite application in the form of Docs from Fuse Labs. With the help of this innovative application, users will now be able to create and share Microsoft style documents with their friends and family directly within Facebook.

• Facebook Launches 6.5 Million Community Pages: In an effort to expand the reach of the various pages created on Facebook and to facilitate ease of use and access for users to these pages, Facebook recently announced the introduction of ‘Like’ button across Facebook along with the introduction of 6.5 million new Community Pages. These pages are intended to enable the user to not only ‘Like’ a specific page, but to also check out the various other topics inside the pages itself and ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ them.

• Facebook outrunning Google in web domination: With the recent release of features from Facebook, it seems that, Facebook has finally managed to give stark competition to the Internet search giant, Google who has been a leading force in the online market. The moves made by Facebook will most evidently make Google Buzz a very outdated concept.

• Activity stream plugin: In an effort to further streamline the user’s operating environment, Facebook has now introduced the ‘Activity Stream’ plug in, where in the users’ feeds would be filtered for the “liked” website’s updates and other not so relevant updates will be filtered out.

• Introduction of 3D Voice Chat & Media Sharing: Realizing the importance of Facebook as a major social network, Mingleverse has now released an all new application called, Facebook 3D Voice Chat and Live Media Sharing application. With the help of this app, users will now be able to communicate with each other in 3D modes and also share media files with their friends in real time.

• Things Facebook should concentrate on: During the ‘Inside Social Apps’ conference, the CEO of popular social network gaming service, Zynga, Mark Pincus, stated that, Facebook should actively look towards the emerging social network app trend that has already become a highly lucrative investment. Considering the fact that, the app economy is now one of the crucial verticals driving the global financial structure, it would do good for Facebook to give more attention to the applications and at the same time move ahead with the website’s improvements.

With the current popularity of Facebook and the rising user base, this social network behemoth has now gotten itself various venues through which it can spread the social networking phenomenon and at the same time, create new ways for revenue generation.