FACEBOOK@10: HAPPY BIRTHDAY

By John Blanshe Musinguzi

Ten years ago, a Harvard student launched this social network from his dorm room, and today, more than a billion people across the world are using this social network to stay in touch with family and friends, meet the love of their lives, etc.
 Facebook, invented by then-19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, has taken the world by storm, making it the most popular social network globally. It boasts more than 1.23 billion monthly users. Honestly, Zuckerberg never knew that Facebook would be the number one social networking sites@10. I would say, this has been due to luck.
I refute claims that Facebook may be under threat from other social networks. Dr Markos Zachariadis, an assistant professor at the Warwick Business School argues that Facebook could be in danger of being overtaken by other online networks. A recent study by Princeton University also predicted that Facebook could lose 80% of its users by 2017.
From a personal experience, I consider it user friendly compared to twitter which is believed to register more users in the next decade. My friend who has both Facebook and Twitter account never knew how to use twitter. He did not know 140 characters rule which had barred him from sending tweets. He had opted to connect to friend using the former.

Most of my friends who have both Facebook and twitter accounts prefer the latter to the former. This means that they will influence the next young generation to first join Facebook, then other social networking platforms possibly.

However not all of them prefer Facebook, notably Charles Onyango-Obbo, Daily Nation-Kenya also does use twitter to share news from its website while others such as Andrew. M. Mwenda have easily succeeded using both of them.

Facebook deserve to be eulogised for connecting us globally. From likes, friends, group joining, we can easily communicate. For example BBC uses it to interact with global listeners who articulate their views easily. Local communication companies also utilise Facebook to interact with fans. In Uganda leading print media outlets from Daily Monitor to New Vision, Observer, and Red Pepper as well as leading radio station do meet their audience on this social net work.

 If really Facebook is not going to lead other social network like twitter, it wouldn’t be having 1.23 billion monthly users out of 7 billion world population. Twitter has about 241 monthly users; this is a third of Facebook users.

We can utilise it to fasten growth of citizen and community journalism to nurture an informed society. Apart posting ‘stuff such am still sleeping,’ we can pioneer developmental issues, brainstorm current political and economical debates. However, useless, such as ‘I am at the bar’ still attract much more reaction than what I would term as developmental issues.

I wish happy 10yrs of positing, liking, commenting, sharing photos, charting , finding  friends, blocking friend, messaging, to mention a few . Not forgetting that most of us have spent less years of Facebooking.

Let me hope that we shall celebrate Facebook@20 together.