Facebooked

It is a facebooked world and why not! almost the major part of the world is hooked to Facebook after a few years of its inception. It has taken the world of communication by storm and made get-togethers, formal meetings history when in real time now friends, colleagues or any user can interact with their counterpart in real time. And the facebook tsunami is such that the popular joke going around facebook at this time is- Why do we love FACEBOOK but hate to FACE the BOOK.

And for those still scratching their heads, facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004 with around 600 million active users at the beginning of 2011, when the world population stood at roughly 3600 million who were above 13, since facebook didn't permit users below 13 to have accounts and thats roughly 1 in 6 people using the facebook service and if we go a lit more deeply considering the number of 1200 million internet users over 13 then it roughly translates to 1 in 2 internet subscribers using the facebook service.

In all its popularity Facebook also owes a lot to the online farming game Farmville which took the world by storm which was exclusive only to facebook and this game attracted a surge of users with farmville having around 80 million active users by the end of 2010.

So its almost safe to say its a facebooked world. And the domination of facebook also led to obituaries for other social networking services like Orkut, Myspace and Hi5. Facebook also let to rest whatever little was left to the letters and Postal services as sending message through facebook was secure, instant and feedback could be obtained in minutes if not seconds.

Facebook was founded by a 20 year old Mark Zuckerberg while attending Harvard as a sophomore who used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the 'hotter' person" which attracted 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online and on the way also made him one of the youngest billionaires in the world with personal wealth estimated to be $13.5 billion at the end of 2010.

And the surge of facebook also gave an opportunity for small and big companies as an extra cost cutting measure especially in the marketing and promotion space because in the flash of a second it could reach to millions of users and that too completely free and also getting higher quality feedback from the target group.

Companies took to designing of their logos, framing catch-lines and advertising through facebook and it got a better response through 1000's of creative minds rather than a few minds of an advertising company which it used to hire earlier and also was a cost-saving exercise.

After Email was introduced in the nineties, facebook changed the communication medium forever.

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