Happy 5th birthday Facebook; free gifts for everybody
Well looky-here! Facebook turns five today, and don't we all know it. The world's most popular social networking website has been around for half a decade and has been a major part of our social online, and offline lives.
With over 150 million people from all corners of the world, spreading over all seven continents, I feel it is fair to say that Facebook has been a phenomenon like no other. Sure, it may well be an "ordinary part of our everyday lives", but if we looked back at the start of the millennium and explained the concept of Facebook then, we simply wouldn't believe it.
I've used Facebook since I was "peer-pressured" into joining by my close symposium of friends in August 2007, just after a holiday to Edinburgh and just before I started university. Without Facebook, my university social life would simply not exist.
Mark Zuckerberg, the god that he is in creating such a website, wrote on their corporate blog:
"While we at Facebook make products that enable people to share information efficiently, Facebook is mostly the product of the people who use it. Without you and the connections you make to others, the products we create wouldn't have much meaning. So we feel fortunate to have all of you with us.
To express our appreciation, we've created a "Thank You" gift, which will be available tomorrow in the Facebook Gift Shop for you to to give freely to others. In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook"
Facebook has evolved from a nerdy, scrawny college project, into a full bodied oasis of social connectivity. The website started in a dorm room at Stanford University, and in the five years it has been running, as toppled the figures of MySpace, Bebo, Orkut and all other social networks. The BBC reports more on this story.
As I have written many times before, for students, Facebook has been a central hub of education, socialisation and connecting with their friends. I've taken a detailed look at the different aspects that the social networking website offers, from terrorism to e-democracy, through to studying online and getting people e-working together and using Facebook to determine a relationship status.
All hail Facebook. Without it, university simply wouldn't be the same.