I'm pleased to announce the launch of this social media explosion of posts and videos between myself and Tim Clark over at Life, Explained, about Facebook. Yes, we've crossed the Atlantic Ocean (electronically) and social media channels to hit everyone everywhere about everything that we wanted to write about Facebook.
Facebook, in a world where every day a new app is announced or a new piece of hardware launched, is ten years old. Ten years ago there wasn't iPhones, or any other smartphones (at least not in a format that we'd recognise), no app stores, again no real tablets...
And my hair was bigger
I apparently joined Facebook in October 2007, which roughly coincides with me getting together with my current partner, so I suspect that the relationship had something to do with me starting on Facebook. And apparently my first status update was "pondering life" which is relatively deep for me as generally the only thing I ponder nowadays is if I can get a quick nap in before having to do something. Or it was possibly me attempting to look deep and philosophical to a girl that at the time had recently completed a course on Philosophy.
Knowing me, that seems likely.
Facebook has changed a hell of a lot over time. I remember when I first used it that the thing that stood out to me was how easy it was to use. When setting your profile up, you could pretty much click on anything you wanted and type whatever you wanted and it'd accept it.
facebook.com is currently the second most visited website in the world (after Google), and shows little sign of losing its dominance on the Internet, with almost 1.3 billion active users, and that number continuing to grow.
Recently they've been hit by the news that they carried out psychological research on users without clearly telling them, and I wonder if I was one of the people selected. I vaguely remember going on Facebook one day, and being asked me how happy I was on a scale of one to ten - I thought this was a slightly odd request, but I answered it and carried on reading my timeline. I must admit that I can't say that I feel particularly upset or violated if Facebook did indeed involve me in their research (although if they do want to give me some compensation then of course it had a very real effect on me and I'd like payment via electronic bank transfer please), that said I am generally fairly oblivious to things that upset other people - I recall staying in a hotel room in Majorca one night, and seeing something scuttle over my suitcase. It scared me for a moment, then I decided that I wouldn't be capable of doing anything about it anyway and so went to sleep.
I like sleep.
At any rate, this is indeed a multimedia explosion of Facebook-related social media stuff, so catch my video about the future of Facebook (which includes a genuine pretend video of what life will look like through Google Glass with a Facebook app) and get to Life, Explained for Tim's stuff there.
I also recommend the very straightforward way that Tim demonstrates, via the medium of animation, a comparison between Facebook and the world. Thanks very much for stopping by if you've traveled over from Tim's excellent blog and I hope you've enjoyed today. If you did, perhaps you may be interested in a warning about a vomit -repelling mattress. Or, if you'd like to hear more about Facebook, here's some thoughts on its logical evolution.
