For those of you who are not familiar with social networking, you may be wondering what Facebook is all about. But you must be living in cave if you haven't heard about Facebook. After all, out the the millions of website on the Internet, Facebook is among the top 5 websites in the entire world. It is this amazing phenomenon that is causing problems for schools and companies.

Facebook is a social website that allows its members to interact with one another in many different ways. A quick (free) registration is required, and anyone can just start adding family and friends to his or her network. Members who belong to the same network of friends can send messages to one another, play games, leave comments, send greeting cards, and do lots of fun stuff.

The problem is, the website offers so many things to do that members are spending way too much time on the sites! In schools, students are logging into Facebook the moment they get their hands on a computer or a laptop. In public computer labs, these students are hogging workstations. Even when they are using personal laptops, they are still hogging bandwidth, making surfing annoying slow for other students who want to use the network for more important stuff - like doing research.

At work, a similar phenomenon is taking place. Employees are spending way too much time on Facebook, chatting with their friends, and basically wasting valuable time. Such activities have affected overall productivity.

To overcome this annoying trend, schools and organizations are installing hardware and software that will block access to Facebook. Such tools are known as Firewalls. When a website is blacklisted by a Firewall, anyone using the network will not be able to access the website. And this is what is happening to school and company networks. This time round, it is the students and employees who are becoming annoyed. The Firewall stops them from connecting with their family and friends on Facebook.

Then someone came up with the idea of proxies. A proxy means that a website is accessed through another server. In other words, instead of making a direct request to Facebook, a request is first sent to a proxy server. The proxy server then send the request to Facebook, and retrieves the response. This response is then sent back to the workstation. To the Firewall, the user appears to be accessing the proxy server, which is not blocked. But in reality, this is just a workaround to allow access to Facebook. But what happens if the proxy server also gets blocked?

Firstly, this is highly unlikely, because a proxy server behaves just like an ordinary server. It is very difficult for a Firewall to detect a proxy server. Secondly, even if a proxy server is blocked, the user can always connect to another proxy server that is not blocked. And since there are literally thousands of proxy servers available on the Internet, it is almost impossible for Firewalls to block all of them.

Using proxies, you are free to access Facebook from school or from work, any time you want.