Tag Archives: Facebook

February 4, 2014 · 18:46

10 years of social networking

Mark Zuckerburg changed the way we socialised 10 years ago connecting us with “friends” around the world.

Facebook changed lives

Facebook has made networking easier. It is a great way to make a personal connection. Prior to Facebook, tracking people down wasn’t easy. The site has reunited long lost friends, relatives and high school classmates.

Everyone knows what the other one is up to. The ability to share information, news, photographs and videos has gotten faster and easier. Facebook allows you to share anything and everything about your life. Facebook has become the biggest online photo album in the world.

Facebook has defined the word ‘friend’. Everyone from a high school teacher to an old aunt is a “friend” on Facebook.

Facebook has been responsible for the increase in citizen journalism. Facebook has advocated free speech that it has been blocked in countries like China.

Facebook has ultimately stolen hours of our precious time, which we will never get back. Find out how much time you have wasted on Facebook here

Look Back

To celebrate it’s 10th anniversary, Facebook has given its users a way to relive their earliest Facebook memories through a special release called Look Back.

Look Back is a personalised movie of their life on Facebook. The video is meant to stir up social networking nostalgia and provide a sentimental experience.

Warning: If you don’t share the video, it will disappear after a month. I accidentally deleted the video and it disappeared from my Facebook profile. I managed to recover it from my cache and uploaded it onto YouTube lest it get lost again.

Here is a video summary of my life of Facebook.

 

Humble beginning

Facebook was founded on 4 February, 2004 as ‘thefacebook’ by Mark Zuckerburg and his fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz and Andrew McCollum.

What started initially as a website only for Harvard students gradually expanded to Stanford University, Columbia University and Yale University before opening up to collages in the Boston area, and other Ivy League institutions. Since 26 September, 2006 Facebook has been open to anyone aged 13 years and over with a valid email address.

On the occasion of it’s 10th anniversary, Mark Zuckerburg released a public statement on Facebook.

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October 28, 2013 · 22:20

Have your Facebook friends turned into giraffes?

If you are seeing many giraffes in your Facebook feed, your friends are clearly not good at riddles. The answer depends whether the user is a giraffe or not.

Here’s why?

A new riddle has stormed the social networking site where users who fail to answer it correctly have to replace their profile picture with a picture of a giraffe for three days.

The riddle is a part of a game set up by an Australian travel blogger Andrew Strugnell titled the Great Giraffe Challenge

The Great Giraffe Challenge

The riddle is:

“3:00 am, the doorbell rings and you wake up. Unexpected visitors. It’s your parents and they are there for breakfast. You have strawberry jam, honey, wine, bread and cheese. What is the first thing you open?”

giraffe

The answer

There are two correct answers. They are:

  1. Open your eyes
  2. Open the door

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September 25, 2013 · 23:43

Social networking sites to open up in China

No Facebook. No Twitter. No Google+. These sites were blocked in China since 2009 onwards. But they are coming back soon.

Internet censorship in China

The internet arrived in China in 1994. The Golden Shield Project popularly known as the Great Firewall of China was started in 1998 and began operations in 2003. This project was based on Deng Xiaoping’s saying, “If you open the window to fresh air, you have to expect some flies to blow in.”

Some of the current methods used by the Chinese internet police include IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, packet filtering, URL filtering, TCP connection reset and VPN blocking.

China has also blacklisted certain keywords from search engines. These are keywords such as democracy, human rights, dictatorship, communism, communist party, Dalai Lama, Chinese democracy movement, Tibet and so on.

Photo and video sharing sites, blogging platforms, discussion forums, peer-to-peer sites and pornography are also blocked.

The lift on the social media ban

The South China Morning Post recently reported that the ban on internet access will be lifted. However, this access will be available only within the Shanghai Free-trade Zone. This region is a mere 28 sq-km out of mainland China’s 9.3 million sq.km area.

China undoubtedly is a huge market and has a largest internet population. This move is a part of the economic and financial reforms that the Chinese government is experimenting with.

The Chinese alternative

All over the world, social media is dominated by Facebook and Twitter. However, China has its own networks, which exceed 100 million active users.

Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are the Chinese equivalents of Twitter. Weibo means microblog. Qzone is China’s largest social networking site. RenRen, another social networking site has a design that is similar to Facebook. Youku Tudou is a video-sharing site similar to YouTube. Soso is the Google of China and can easily be mistaken for the previous Google China website. Baidu is another popular search engine in China.

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