I never forget the very first time when I visited facebook.com. It was in September 2004 when facebook was very new and no one really knew about it. I heard about it through my ex girlfriend.She asked me to join to be able to keep in touch more conveniently. So I did. I had just about 30 friends. I remember very well there were no applications, no videos, no notes, and of course no advertisements anywhere on the website.
All that you could do was to change your status from the preset statuses (e.g. I'm at the library, at work and etc.), write on friends' wall, send messages, poke them, see their pictures and pretty much that was it. Facebook was simple, neat and fast. Did I mention that you had to have a valid college e-mail address to join? Yeah, my mother and grand father weren't able to join. So it was really unique. In reality facebook has tremendously transformed since its start in February 2004 till now. When you look at it closely, you can see that not only many of its previous features are no longer available, and not only a whole new level of features were added, but one can really conclude that facebook's mission and goal generally changed.
Facebook at its starting point was only a social networking website for college students, meaning that you could actually join college networks (which you still can do) and then also in your information section of your profile you could show what classes you're taking. That feature for instance is no longer being provided, and I personally loved that feature because I was able to connect to my classmates very easier since all I had to do was to join Math122 for Fall 06 and then I'd see a list of all other students in my school who are taking the same class. As you can see facebook was intended for something else. It's no longer what it was and it completely transformed into a social networking website competing with Myspace and others.
Currently facebook has over 360 million users all over the globe and this number is continuously growing. Most importantly facebook now stands after Google in the list of world's most visited websites. It has surpassed the monster of the Internet, Yahoo, pushing it to be the third most visited.
The question that is raised in my mind is, what is it with facebook that in such short period of time it became so widespread and recognizable and of course used by all different age groups. Currently my entire family are a member of facebook and for us facebook is like having a cellular phone, and or an e-mail in which one can no longer finding it optional rather than necessary. I for one can no longer go without being on facebook. I did many attempts during the previous years to reduce my dependency on facebook but it was simply impossible.
Let's put it this way, facebook now serves as a medium of exchange in terms of information, and who doesn't want information? I find out about many interesting events in my area through facebook, my friends and I set our dates and nights out on facebook using the threads. It's amazing the kinds of things one can do through facebook. I must certainly mention that it was for facebook that I was able to find many of my classmates from first and second grades. People who I had long forgotten about but still knew their name. All it took me was to run a simple search on their names and there they were. I added them and now I am connected to my family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, classmates and etc. throughout the entire world. What could be better than that?
But facebook like everything else tangible or intangible, it has it's flaws and in the next article, I'll be addressing some of the negative aspects of facebook. However this article is yet to be completed so check back for new updates and edits.
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