Welcome To Facebook - The Truth Behind 'The Social Network'

With the recent flotation and the legal battles of The Social Network movie, it's easy to miss the real story behind Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook eight years ago as a university network at Harvard but, today, 13% of the world's population have signed up to his website. And now he's listed on the Stock Exchange in a deal reported to be worth $100 billion.

But for him, it is clearly about more than the money. He has given everyone a platform to share and follows what he preaches on his own Facebook page. The development of FB is directly related to the growth of people's desire to share, which clearly becomes addictive.

However, the unprecedented user growth cannot go on forever so now they need to offer people more reasons to use the site for longer and more often. They want to make the time you spend there so valuable that you want to keep coming back every day. So now we see games and apps, as well as business brands.

Although studying psychology and computer science at Harvard, Zuckerberg was always more interested in making a social network for the internet and had been involved in a project at High School which put the names and faces of students onto the school website. He recalled dreaming about being able to share experiences on the internet but always thought someone else would do it.

Curiously, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg were both taught by the same professor at Harvard. Harry Lewis said that Zuck was eager to learn but, like Gates before him, he was very sceptical as to whether what they were teaching him was what he needed to be learning. He absorbed but didn't pay full attention at the same time.

The Face Book was a printed album of student's photos and details. As is seen in the film, Zuckerberg and his friends came up with a prank which would use this information to make a website which would compare the looks of the various students. It was called the Face Mash and caused a furor because he hacked into the college database to populate all the images. It was the most used site on campus on that Sunday afternoon but privacy issues forced them to take it down and also delayed the launch of the official Harvard campus website.

However, Mark Zuckerberg was not listening and launched his own version of thefacebook, getting round the privacy laws by inviting people to post their own information. It was a huge success within its first week and it was not long before other colleges wanted to have facebooks at their schools too.

Whilst there were student sites at many colleges across America and a number of other popular social networks at the time - Myspace, Friends Reunited and friendster - Zuckerberg's experience in psychology and computer science meant that Facebook became a technology company which designed social products and that creativity is what has made him and his company unique.

But where there is creativity, there also tends to be legal disputes over ideas and the case of the Winklevoss twins was eventually settled for $65 million with Zuckerberg still denying their claims that he stole their idea.

With its simple design and Zuckerberg's determination never to let it crash, the Facebook became very popular in those early days and in the summer vacation he moved to California, renting a small house in Silicon Valley for himself and some friends and they all hung out and worked on the project and started getting recognition in the media.

By the autumn, the Facebook had reached 200k users and required lots more bandwidth, so he pitched for and won an investment of $500k from nearby venture capitalists. The 'the' was dropped and so Facebook.com was born.

In 2005, they had achieved a million users and in 2006, Zuckerberg turned down an offer from Yahoo to sell the network for $1bn. Despite pressure from his friends and colleagues to accept, he declined and, instead, opened Facebook to anyone with an email address, resulting in an additional 50k new users joining every day.

In 2007 Microsoft offered $15bn and Zuck turned that down as well.

Zuckerberg said the hardest one to turn down was the Yahoo $1bn one and many of his co-workers who were not into it for the long term left in disappointment. But he held his nerve and continued to grow his dedicated team, whilst keeping the profits in house.

When the 100 million users mark was reached, he realised that he needed to find a way to make money from the audience he had built. He poached Sheryl Sandberg, a senior advertising executive from Google. She knew AdWords and could show him how to move into this lucrative area.

And so advertising started to appear on Facebook... and the rest, as they say, is history.

Whether you need a basic Welcome To Facebook guide or the answer to the question How Does Twitter Work, Lollipop Local give simple, clear instructions about how to use these new technologies to get more customers.

Lollipop Local, Suite 1, 103 Leigh Road, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex SS9 1JL 01702 476517

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Bloggers Ethics - Truth and Fairness

Various social medias and blogs plays a very important part in present-day journalism. It's a useful source to the media persons in gathering various news. They are now the bridge between journalists and the people. Journalists very often pick serious and important issues from the blog and verify the ethical standards of fairness, accuracy, truthfulness, transparency and independence when using social media as you do on air and on all digital and printed news platforms.

It is very pertinent that social media should also check all the postings, comments about their truthfulness and fairness.

All information gathered from social media like blog posting, their comments should go through scanner before their posting. Moreover, their source of information, correctness should also be provided while posting and the reader should not be left guessing on misleading information.

In many cases it has experienced that wrong information leads to an outcry in some places, state or in the country. All postings in the social media are live and are available to anybody at any time. It is therefore essential to correct any mistake may it factual or by omission, so that while it is archives reader can go through the correction.

When any content or video being used from the blogs or social media, before their use some logical question should be asked, like what is the truthfulness of the content, what is the reason of their posting and the right of the person of the posting and the picture. Does the person has the legal right of the photograph or is it his/her own shoot? Often it was seen that image or video been manipulated, so before it's using meta-data should be checked.

Freedom of speech and expression is a constitutionally guaranteed fundamental right of the Indian people. Article 19 (1; a) ensures the implicit freedom but Article 19 (2) qualifies this in explicit terms. The Parliamentary Proceedings (protection of Publication) Act of 1977 and the Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matter (Repeal Act) of 1977 further reinforce and restrict these freedoms.While constitutional guarantees ensure freedom of the press and expression, press and media are obligated by a self-regulatory system of ethics that protect people and organizations from defamatory behavior.

Twitter, Facebook are Social sites and have a system of "privacy" setting, users can choose not to have their pictures or expression in front of the uninvited public. Collecting content from a public social site is different from inquisitive behind a password-protected wall posing as a friend. Accessing "private" content, journalists should apply the same guidelines and ethics as per Act of 1977 for undercover journalism. So before using any content, picture or video due consideration should be given to the followings:

- Does the content has a 'reasonable expectation' of privacy?

- Is this a content of great significance?

- Is there any alternate way to get the information?

- Are you willing to show your methods and reasoning, if challenged?

- What are your journalistic motivations?

I agree that each of us has our opinion which is what makes the blogosphere so popular, if we all agreed we would have the nothing to debate or to talk about. But we should also apply the following blogging ethics:

That we shall not lie

That we shall honor our country

That we shalt not recoil before thine enemy

That we shall always stay faithful

That we shall always be the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil

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2012: The Truth About the End

Ah, the time has come at last, hasn't it? Never have numbers been so dreaded as the ones that were lit in New York on New Years Eve, when the ball fell like a massive guillotine, and in the minds of thousands of onlookers, doomed us all. Never have I seen so many people frightened, so many people preparing, and never have I seen so many YouTube videos, books, pamphlets and religious conversions regarding fate post 2012.

I think before we examine the true significance behind 2012, we'll take a look at some of my personal favorite theories about what's going to happen on this so-called fateful year.

One of the smaller theories prevailing is that apparently we're going to suffer a massive pole shift, a magnetic reversal so powerful that our planet will suffer immense disasters great enough to wipe out two thirds of the population.

Now, pole shifts are scientifically proven to occur for our planet. In fact, did you know that Alaska used to be on the equator? A pole shift found it where it is today. It would be more surprising to learn that our planet DOESN'T have pole shifts; the fact that we live in America rather than Pangaea proves that the planet is constantly changing, shifting, and rearranging itself in just about every which way imaginable. But while the earth's magnetic fields have shown a decline lately, there's no reason to link that to 2012. There's speculation in the scientific community that we may enter a pole shift come 2015 to 2017, but the course of a magnetic pole reversal literally takes hundreds to thousands of years to happen. It doesn't happen over the span of a year, and it certainly doesn't happen overnight. And even during the shifts of the poles, there's been no actual report of increased volcanic activity or tectonic shifting.

As for the other type of pole shifting, that being rotational shifting, there is no reason to believe that 2012 will have anything to do with the axis of the earth suddenly shifting position. Whether we're flying through some universal dust cloud or not, it would take massive amounts of energy to barely brush us twenty degrees off axis, let alone flip us all the way around. In actuality, anything hitting us massive enough to flip our axis would probably destroy our planet entirely. So in that case, you might as well hang up your bunker helmet, relax, and have a few last drinks with the rest of us. No amount of reinforcement will save you.

Moving onto the next theory... We have solar flares/solar storms. Apparently massive solar storms are predicted to come in 2012, producing enough radiation to wipe out our technology and civilization as it stands. I'll just be the first to tell you flat out: we have solar flares all the time. They're sometimes responsible for knocking out minor communications temporarily; they bring, at best, sheer inconvenience. While there have been strong solar flares in the past that have knocked out electrical power grids and communications - the price you pay for putting those things in space - it can safely be said that the human race lived on to see another day. The fact is the sun's unpredictable. We can predict solar flares/solar storms about as well as we can predict hurricanes, and if you can show me a report reading that a solar flare killed millions of people, then I've got a house in Florida to sell you.

Ooh, my personal favorite theory is up next on this skeptic's chopping block!

The dreaded Planet X/Planet Nibiru theory.

First of all, I'm not sure where people even drew up the existence of the ancient planet Nibiru. It's first mentioned by someone who goes by the name of Sitchin, who was apparently a self-taught translator of Sumerian cuneiform. This pretty much means exactly what it says. Self-taught means it's bound to be flawed, and compared to the academic works of others, it is. But even as clumsy as Sitchin's work involving the translation of this mystical 12th planet was, he never mentioned anything about the planet crashing into Earth, or crashing into the sun, or causing the planet to stop rotating, or anything of that sort. Nibiru was rather adapted into the farfetched works of a woman from Wisconsin named Nancy Lieder, who claimed that Planet X and Planet Nibiru were one and the same. She also claimed that Halle's Comet didn't exist, that the planet was going to be destroyed in 2003, and that apparently huge objects become invisible when they fly into a special magnetic field near the sun. It's far from my intention to be nasty or condescending, but I think you know where I'm going with this.

Planet X was a hypothetical planet that scientists thought they spotted in the 1930s. Even then they only thought it was another planet because they thought they discovered discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. Long story short, these discrepancies were the result of a miscalculation of Neptune's mass. Planet X was strictly a hypothetical that turned out to be the imaginary result of a mathematical error. Nothing more, nothing less. NASA is not hiding anything from you. There's no truth to hide, save for the fact that someone goofed on a computer, perhaps.

But let's disregard Kepler's Laws - which, I remind you, is required to entertain this theory - and assume that a planet eight times the size of earth somehow managed to get into our solar system, at just the far enough length to go on an extremely eccentric elliptical orbit only to be knocked on track by an asteroid. The fact remains that if an object that size did suddenly stop the planet from turning, the planet would be torn completely apart by the massive amount of energy that would be required. And if I'll take a second to be candid, I'm not sure I understand how a planet crashing into our sun stops our planet for a week only for it to reboot and turn in the opposite direction.

If the planet stopped on a dime and happened to NOT be destroyed by the energy required to brake it (which would be enough to bring entire oceans to a boiling point and - need I remind you - enough to destroy our planet completely, just by the way)... Well, let's examine basic science here if we weren't earlier. The earth rotates at roughly 1100 miles per hour. If the earth stopped rotating that suddenly, the atmosphere would still be shifting at that very speed. That means anything that isn't bedrock is going to be swept up into the atmosphere. Say goodbye to trees, say goodbye to animals, say goodbye to the surface of the earth, say goodbye to... just about everything. Meaning no, your reinforced bunker won't save you.

The simple fact is if something that massive WERE heading our way, it would definitely be visible to the naked eye by now. Even planets a little farther off than our neighbors like Venus and Jupiter are visible at certain times of the year; if something were edging ever closer at a high enough velocity to destroy us, tip us, what have you, be it a large planet eight times the size of earth or even a brown dwarf, trust me, you would see it. I'm not an astronomer, but the fact that I'm able to tell you this confidently should tell you something.

But these popular theories aside...

It's about time to tackle the real issue with why everyone is so wrapped up in the 2012 boogaloo.

Yes, the Mayan calendar.

The Mayan calendar isn't really well studied by many people, and there's actually a reason for that. The Mayan calendar is actually extremely complicated. It's hard to understand unless you actually have a competent grasp on the Mayan culture aside from the broad strokes that history textbooks give you. I will go ahead and say that beyond my classes in world history, I don't really grasp the intricacies of the Mayan culture or likewise, the Mayan calendar. I'm aware that it's speculated that they disappeared off the face of the earth somehow, or a good number of them did, anyway, and I'm also aware that their culture demanded a lot of impressive ingenuity. But I can only give you the basics of the Mayan calendar.

There are 260 days in the Mayan calendar, and it's actually two calendars running simultaneously. One for religious purposes, the other for tracking the solar months. A single day could have up to twenty names, and there's even a month where the days are considered so unlucky that people born on them will die miserable deaths and thus don't have names at all. But the general knowledge everyone shares about it is that it ends on the winter solstice of 2012.

The general conclusion about this is that it means the Mayans predicted the end of the world. Which is basically what happens when you don't associate yourself more closely with the culture perpetuating this so-called prediction.

A lot of the ancient cultures strongly believed that our world revolved into and out of eras in spiritual cycles. Indian myth perpetuates that our world revolves into spiritual 1,000 year long ages called kalpas where virtue falls away before destruction brings renewal, for example. The Mayans believed in something somewhat similar (minus the whole destruction of the universe); that every 5,125 years, the earth will shift spiritually into a new cycle. There are basically five cycles that metaphorically correspond to the time of day; first cycle is obviously morning, second cycle is the midday, third cycle is the afternoon, the fourth cycle is the night, and the fifth cycle is the darkest age before the coming of the first cycle again. If you guessed that 2011 puts us in the fifth cycle, then you guessed correctly.

Basically the Mayans predicted that 2012 would be our shift into a new first cycle. If anything, this shift should mean renewal, rebirth, we'll be revisiting the values we once knew where Nature is revered and God is about love rather than about who's right and who's burning in Hell. Or well, that's what it SHOULD mean, but that's essentially up to us. If we continue to fall victim to human limitations such as greed, negativity, materialism, anger, pride, all the things that confine us to the transient and superficial, then 2012 may very well have all the momentum to be destructive and horrific in ways that make us wish those other theories were plausible. There is no greater destruction than the destruction of the spirit.

More and more I've been thankfully seeing this awakening. Or at least, I'm seeing it more in the people I've been around; people are beginning to have insights into the true nature of spirituality. A lot has changed around where I've grown up and while it's taken a while, there's been a great shift in mentality. I remember when there were KKK marches around my town, people discriminated against homosexuality, and quite frankly I was in the midst of a sea of people using scripture to justify hypocritical condemnation of those who thought differently than they did. But nowadays? While I wouldn't be surprised to find people still exhibiting these traits, and I still have encountered a few that use scripture to justify discrimination, it's become pleasantly rarer nowadays. People are beginning to realize more and more of the truth. People are changing. It's been a slow process and it will continue to be a slow process, but the world just isn't rigid black and white anymore. While it's a double edged sword for sure, our ability to exchange and learn information instantaneously has made us thirst for education. We're no longer satisfied with 'it's just the way things are', and we're not taking 'don't question it or you're bad' as an answer.

Or at least, a good lot of the people I see nowadays certainly aren't. People are also realizing the truth that unfortunately some religions are more about business and less about the good of their congregations. We have the ability to step forward and change all of that, or at least, that's in accordance to the Mayan prophecy of 2012. That is the truth of 2012. It's not destruction, it's not doomsday, it's not a catastrophe. It has the potential to be, but I think with enough people waking up, there's a chance.

Or maybe that's just me being overly optimistic, but I do like to dream as anyone else, after all.

About the Author

Zri Kolsen is an up and coming writer who has tried all assortments of writing in her practice from movie reviews to fictional stories, from specified editing to argumentative articles, and she invites you to come contact her at http://zrikolsen.wordpress.com/. Questions, comments and contact about what she can do for you are always welcome!

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