2020systems Blog

Facebook has announced that it has 500 million active users around the world.

Each Facebook user has on average 130 friends and shares 70 bits of personal information — including home movies and family photos — every month. With 500 million users detailing their moods and passions online, Facebook is more than a social networking site. It’s a global phenomenon that’s shaping the way people communicate.

Facebook has half a billion users around the world (130 million in U.S.). That’s huge for a planet of less than 7 billion people. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous nation after China and India.  Every 1 out of 12 people on this planet has a Facebook account.

What grew as the pet project of Mark Zuckerberg, when he was a student at Harvard, has exploded — gaining eight new users ever second for the past 15 months. Facebook has changed the way many people communicate — letting its millions of users share personal thoughts and images with their network of friends.

Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said, “People have really gotten connected, not only sharing more information and different kinds but being more open and with more people and that social norm is just something that’s changed over time.”

And people share a lot. Whole lives play out on Facebook. Births. Graduations. Marriage. Even divorce. Some experts say that sharing too much information can have downsides — including affecting the way prospective employers may evaluate a job candidate.

And some people are downright negative about it. “I think it’s terrible. It’s narcissistic,” said Facebook user Julia. Yet, people share personal information on the site 70 times per month on average.

And what was once an online destination only for college students has expanded, says Michael Nelson. He worked at IBM and currently teaches at Georgetown University. “It’s grandmas, it’s executives, it’s politicians. It’s everybody. The fastest group of users — it’s the over sixty group,” he said.

Bonnie Speich logs on once a week to keep in touch with family. “Every minute of my grandson’s life is on that thing,” she said. Mike Aedenran checks in a lot. “I usually go on about five times a day, five to ten minutes every time,” he said.

But not everyone is excited about having an online community of friends. Kevin Sampson said “If they are finding comfort with friends online rather than meeting people, that’s pretty sad.”

Still, Facebook is so popular that public figures have taken notice. President Barack Obama is credited with using the power of Facebook during his 2008 campaign. Even Pope Benedict has a profile — sharing updates in eight languages.

And Facebook played a role during Iran’s post-election upheaval. Khsro, a graduate student from Iran said “For a lot of Iranians, like a year ago, it became one of the foremost important tools to get news from inside Iran. Right after the elections, basically the international news agencies were not allowed to get news and the first place you would check for the videos from Iran, the protest videos and so on, was just on Facebook.”

Information can easily go viral with the click of a mouse, says Nelson. “Now we have this technology for this one community to talk to another community, and all these different conversations happen at the same time. Almost effortlessly,” he said. He says, the future of social media is mobile. More phones will be able to support Facebook giving even more people access to their online communities from the palm of their hand.

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

Twitter today changed its tagline from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”

This esentially bring the social networking and micro-blogging service with 140 characters to become a “Local Real-time search engine”.

The location-stamping or geocoding of content and the release of that data to third parties (online and in mobile) will unleash a wide range of creative applications and expressions for local tweets.

Indeed, newly hired Twitter COO Dick Costolo emphasized that mobile would be a prominent use case for this location-oriented data.  That’s clear, as people look to Twitter-enabled local-mobile apps to find out who’s around and what’s going on.  This innovation should bring more explosive growth to the platform.

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