Last Tuesday, the Business Society organised a talk by Blake Chandlee, one of the Heads of Facebook for Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Chandlee left his job as the commercial director Yahoo! UK to work as the first international employee of Facebook. With just over 1,200 employees, this is possibly one of the most sought after companies to work in within the media and technology hierarchies today. Google has around 22,000 employees and Facebook has decided not to employ more than a tenth of this. Chandlee’s role is to build the UK sales team and work directly with advertisers and agencies to develop commercial opportunities to help generate further revenue. Like a true salesman, Chandlee managed to sell us Facebook with a history of developments and controversies many of us had never known.
According to Chandlee, 50 per cent of Facebook users log in every day and spend an average of 25 minutes on the site. Within the demographics of users, more 18 to 24 year olds use Facebook than those within the 50+ range. However, when you break down these figures, more 55 year olds use Facebook than 18 year olds. This surprised us all due to the fact that Facebook started from a college campus and the first networks expanding all over America were those of college students.
Facebook can be seen as a digital living room. We socialise on it, network, hang up our qualifications and emblems of interests such as fan sites on it. The profile page has become so personal that when Facebook received its most dramatic facelift, during which the Newsfeed item was created, Stanford University students used pickets and posters aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, hounding him to get rid of the Newsfeed, considering it as an invasion of their privacy. News headlines read : ‘Facebook reports on you behind your back” and newsfeed was called an “autostalker”. There was a Facebook group made on Facebook itself called: Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook) with over 170, 000 people joined.
Instead of the “Live Feed” with friends’ status updates and activities, “News Feed” picks stories that Facebook thinks its user will enjoy based on a variety of factors including how many friends have liked it and commented on it. The News Feed has slowly gained acceptance as users learned they could control which stories were sent out. Ironically, now, Facebook users spend 70 per cent of their time on News Feed itself.
We also learnt that Facebook itself does not know its growth limitations. They are growing by 5 per cent a month and this penetration level has not flattened off. Facebook recently left China due to China’s insistence upon access to its user’s information and filtering content. Facebook decided it was against the company’s ethos. Global technology giants such as Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems have cooperated with the Chinese government in implementing a system of internet censorship in mainland China. Yahoo also stated that the company will not adhere to the privacy policies of its Chinese customers from the authorities.
Facebook is an enormous source of personal data. Chandlee spoke of how internet users behaved differently on Facebook than anywhere else online. They use real names, mobile numbers and personal emails. However, rather than jumping at such a fruitful business opportunity, Facebook took a stand and decided to back out of China. This is admirable that such a modern company with an aim to reach a network of one billion people will manage to keep to its company values.
Chandlee stated however that Facebook does on occasion work with governments to track criminals with Facebook accounts and also stated that it does not ban Pro-Nazi content in the world except Germany.
Facebook launched the Facebook Platform in, 2007 which provides a framework for software developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features The number of Facebook platform applications had grown to 33,000. and the number of registered developers had exceeded 400,000. Farmville has been the most popular, as well as chess. User’s moves are saved on the website too allowing them to pause until their next log-in.
Facebook has struck a chord with millions of students. Any technology that is able to captivate so many students for so much time not only carries implications for how those students view the world but also offers an opportunity for educators to understand the elements of social networking. In a social experiment, five journalists are planning to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news they can gain. This shows the type interest even from academics.
Facebook has a 30 day policy of taking down a profile once they have learnt a user has deceased, however, on request, Facebook evaluates a request and many of the profiles stay online, leaving a lasting memorial for the student and their friends. People share their pain through comments and notes. A person’s profile can be a virtual memorial.
In 2008, The Collins English dictionary declared “Facebook” as their new Word of the Year . The beauty of Facebook is that it connects people regardless of geographical barriers with an importance of creating content over simply consuming it. Mark Zuckerberg’s mantra of ‘Efficiency, Effectiveness, Scale’, is working towards a worldwide domination, its penetration levels unknown, and its popularity ever increasing. Its critics need to face up to this reality.
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