There are few people left on this planet who don’t know what Facebook is, or don’t use it. Ignited by a young, optimistic man named Mark Zuckerberg, who believed that people in all the world will join hands, thus becoming a big funny family, this spark rapidly turned into a world-wide phenomenon, with dozen of uses and implications. You don’t have a Facebook account? You probably don’t exist. Do you have one? By now, you are probably addicted to it. You have a business page? Your web developer must be torturing his brains to come up with a new application and your on-line manager dreams of new campaigns ready to convert into millions. The regular user? Posts anything from their Morning wake-up mood to incredibly useless pictures of … everything. Does it have dark corners? Well, the Internet has some places no sane human mind would want to travel to, and Facebook isn’t an exception. Basically, it runs our lives and follows us every day, telling stories we ourselves didn’t think we had. But let’s try to sneak-peek and see what’s behind the blue curtain.
1. The Color Blue
On Facebook, everything from the home page to the smallest of buttons is blue, no matter we are talking logos, mobile apps or pop-ups. Well, maybe this didn’t bother many people to look into the matters, since almost every major site or network or search engine has its distinctive colors or patterns (many of them being of blue nuances), but on a funny, “did you know” side, Zuckerberg chose the color blue for his project because he is colorblind. Not distinguishing red from green, blue became the best next thing.
2. Back to the History
In 2004, four college students created a closed, university network, very similar to the old high school year book that contained all the pictures and the data regarding a graduate class. The “book of faces” was born in February and its founding fathers were Mark Zuckerberg Eduardo Severin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Huges. Their dream was to create a more open and connected world. Little did they forsee the network’s expansion and the following issues regarding the individual’s right to privacy or recruiting minors for pedophilia networks.
3. Some numbers
“This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month.” This was a message posted by Zuckerberg himself in 2012, when indeed a billion constant users were registered. Did we mention this is a phenomenon? Well, it is: on an average scalem, a person has more than 130 Facebook friends. Each day, around 250 million photos are uploaded, people can get to choose the menu in 70 language and over 600 million people use the mobile application to get connected. And these were only last year’s statistics.
4. The Movie
The whole Facebook history was captured in a movie called “The Social Network”, released in 2011. The film is a drama exposing all parties points of view regarding the Facebook scandal, its paternity, its founding members’ involvement, Zuckerberg’s rise and the company’s drawbacks.
5. The Active User
In 2012, a major statistics site, told the world that 48% of the users aged between 18 and 35 years old check their Facebook feed after waking up in the morning and 28% check their news on the mobile apps even before getting out of bed. Oh, morning coffee… how obsolete have you become…
6. All in One SEO Pack
Facebook was the most searched for word in 2010, being responsible for 2.11% of all searches in the US. Digitalbuzzblog.com is a statistics provider that helps understanding better how “viral” Facebook became in the last years.
7. It’s Addictive
Seriously, there is a disorder called The Facebook Addict Disorder. Among the symptoms, we can easily recognize the following: people spend almost the entire day online, while not online, they think about what’s going on on Facebook right now. People tend to less use the other options of human interaction, ignoring the e-mail, the other chat networks and even the phone. There are also individuals who consier quitting Facebook as if they quit smoking, being proud of not using the network for several days in a row. At some point, rumors said that Facebook will go extinct, because people got tired of it. Far from any truth, as this year’s statistics show that people are willing to spend as much time in the virtual world as they did last year.
8. A Perfect Marketing Machine
Now every small to titanic business in the world markets on Facebook. It’s cheap, fast and the conversion sometimes gets higher than 1% as the usual rate is. The company offers business owners such a wide range and possibility of applications that one can spend days or months upgrading and improving their business page. Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Red Bull, Oreo, Converse, Skittles, Playstation, iTunes, Pringles, Victoria’s Secret, McDonald’s, just o name a few, have an immense Facebook presence and gather millions of fans. Facebook Logout Experience is something of great worth to huge corporations, while a small business can use the Landing Page feature to get more fans.
9. The Dangers
As we said, Facebook has its dark and twisted corners too. Besides the identity protection and the personal data protection and the personal data being sold without permission issues, there are others that are even more serious. Child pornography, identity theft, economical espionage, sexual, discriminative, violent and occult content, stalking, etc, are the major issues specialists warn us about.
10. Life Goes On
Facebook is nowhere near its last days. This billionaire company and its creator still have many aces in their sleeves and are convinced they will unify the world in some way. The Info Graph Search feature is said to be this year’s major breakthrough. In January 2013, Zuckerberg stated that “Graph search is not Web search”. Zuckerberg pointed out that a Web search with the query “hip-hop” will present links about hip-hop; Facebook’s graph search, on the other hand, can answer a query like “Which of my friends live in San Francisco?” (https://arstechnica.com)
More than half of Facebook users are no longer in college, while users 25 and older are now the fastest growing demographic for the social networking site. Although most of the users in this age group have graduated from college, they are still active on the site.
I constantly spent my half an hour to read this webpage’s posts everyday along with a cup of coffee.