FB: a basic necessity of life

The Social Network, released in last October, revealed the bona fide saga behind the inception of one of the fastest growing Internet companies - Facebook. In just six years, FB had clocked up 500 million active users and furnished the youngest billionaire in history... but for this entrepreneur, success led to both personal snags and legal holdups. Even though the top brass at FB denied any nexus with the movie, the makers deemed it to be a true story. Whatever may be the reality of the foundation of FB, the movie was worth a watch.

Facebook, a mouthful topic, has certainly become a basic necessity of life and is absolutely one of the best things to have happened in the last decade. In fact, people are getting addicted to such an extent that FB notifications are preferred to the Office Outlook/Office Mailbox. According to Nielsen, in January 2010, the amount of time the average person spent on Facebook was more than seven hours and each American FB user spent an average of 421 minutes per month, which amounts to more than 14 minutes per day. Currently, 2.6 million minutes are spent on FB each day!!

Undoubtedly, FB is a great platform to promote businesses, to endorse campaigns and to do show-offs. However, it has faced condemnation on issues such as online privacy, child safety, inability to terminate accounts without deleting the content, etcetera. To add to this, the censorship issues have taken their toll on FB as there is no control over the inappropriate content. There are loads of applications which post unsuitable and ill-fitted images on the page with just one click.

Is downfall looming?
Last month, a Market Research company published a report on how and why FB is losing millions of users. It claimed that privacy issues and fatigue have caused 1lakh Britons and 6 million users in the US to shut their FB accounts. Even Canada is catching up fast in this race of FB dropouts. It saw a fall of about 1.5 million users while in Russia the numbers fell by more than a hundred thousand. Ironically, when FB was aiming to touch the feat of one billion members, its growth rate slumped for the second consecutive month. Some internet psychologists have predicted that Facebook users would suffer the same kind of fatigue that comes whenever men and women get bored with trying anything that is new.

Well, it’s dead right that people get terribly excited about something new (such as posting some random objects captured with their SLRs(courtesy Mishraji)) and after a while the novelty wears off.