“Facebook” - the in thing

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and schools or colleges. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 350 million active users worldwide. Call it the better connection like MTN, “wibyihererana” (don’t keep it to yourself) like the new TIGO says and “Tulikumwe” (we are together) like Rwandatel says. Anything you can call it, facebook still fulfills those intentions. Despite the fact of ICT’s growth in Rwanda, this has accelerated the number of facebook users. You must agree with me this is the most fascinating, visited, and fun website for all social levels on the internet nowadays. The chats, photos, profiles, comments…name it. With the latest technology of phones that are internet enabled, the site receives more than a million people a day. For the mean time it has also given chance to different phones like the blackberry and iphones to down load facebook for free. The latest update features on facebook is the News Feed and Mini Feed. They are a different way of looking at the news about your friends but they do not give out any information that wasn’t already visible, it enables you to see the latest happenings from your social circles on facebook. Once more thumbs up for facebook because it is doing great; its intentions have largely come true and useful. Many people have made many new friends, and many have kept in touch though far from each other. Some of the users have taken their friendship to an extra level. I have often heard of people who met on facebook and the next thing you hear is the wedding bells; anyway that’s how useful it is to some users. For some entrepreneurs, marketing has also been made easy because it displays a page for adverts. The latest updates about education, news, and politics are featured. It is so possible to join a political party and you are updated about the events going on in the group. Despite the friendship networking, facebook has gone a mile further to bring the news to your table. For example the latest “Haiti earthquake dilemma”—because of facebook, most people know about the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Tuesday and issues about providing Aid to the country have gotten big on the site. Following late reports, researchers say that though the site is advantageous and interesting, it has been misused at the same time. Many people have used it to exchange messages that have negatively impacted the lives of others. Family breakups have been reported, relationships lost, some people have been conned of their money using the same site. Last year December Divorce lawyers said they were really surprised to see 20 percent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook. Emma Brady a native in London said, she found out her husband was divorcing her when he updated his facebook status. It read, “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady.” However I would say it’s because of the much less privacy lately. The 25 year-old Facebook CEO, Zuckerberg was recently speaking at an awards ceremony in San Francisco, and said that privacy was “no longer a social norm” and that “people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people.” Meanwhile, facebook has also yielded insecurity lately. This was witnessed last year in December when the “Kill Obama” facebook group was active for a month. The group had been created in Alberta, Canada and had 122 members and five administrators. Nevertheless, facebook has still caught the eyes of the people and the number of users is still growing. rutarindwabob@yahoo.co.uk