Say What: Facebooked!

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Facebooked!

On July 21,2010 company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a very significant announcement on the official Facebook blog: "As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them." The number is mind boggling - consider this - this means that 12.5% of the world's population (i.e. 1 in 12 people on the planet!) are on Facebook!

People today perhaps don't remember a time before Facebook - and that's both scary and fascinating. Future generations will be more and more accepting of sharing their lives on the Internet, which has its obvious pros and cons. At the other end of the spectrum, whenour generation grows old and wants to look back on our lives, we won't need an old crusty photo album and Greenday to sing:
So take the photographs, and still frames in your mind
Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial
For what it's worth it was worth all the while.

We will simply use whatever popular device at the time that lets us flip through our life's history as aggregated from decades of social sharing.

Facebook has been at the forefront of paving the way for that future. It has taken 77 months for Facebook to go from 0 to 500 million and the company shows little sign of slowing, even with many leaving the network over privacy issues. The truth is, there is no viable alternative yet.

Anyway here are some fun Facebook stories of what could have been if the FB existed back in the day. I strongly urge you to click on the images below and see the larger image

Starting off with a classic:
Kokonad Sinha's Facebook Ramayan