Adam Arinder is off to work.
Adam Arinder is hooked on Assassin’s Creed 2.
Adam Arinder is typing my column.
(Insert your name here) is now reading Adam Arinder’s column.Now just imagine a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s “Creep,” and you got yourself a fine movie trailer.
Those first three sentences were my last three status updates on Facebook with the final one being what should pop up on yours.
There have been plenty of columns written about Facebook in the past, so there’s no point in going into any discussions about etiquette or history.
It wastes time, it’s a perfect procrastination tool, it’s a great way to keep up with old friends and it’s also a great way to blow all your money buying virtual tools to have the best farm in “Farmville.”
Facebook has taken over.
It’s killed MySpace.
Twitter is around and highly successful, but it just doesn’t have the same depth of stalking capabilities Facebook offers.
It doesn’t seem like anything can pass up this networking giant — it just keeps growing.
Last week, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the social networking giant has passed the 500 million-user mark.
That’s a hell of a lot of farms.
It seems more good news is just around the corner for Zuckerberg as well. Besides being a multibillionaire (yes, that’s billion with a “b”) before age 30 and holding the personal information of more than 500 million people, a movie showcasing the early years of Facebook’s life is set to be released this October, titled “The Social Network.”
Thus the prior movie trailer reference.
With its full-length theatrical trailer debuting before “Inception” — which is a fantastic movie you need to go see — “The Social Network” covers Facebook’s inception (see what I did there?) in a Harvard dorm room as well as the repercussions of what happened to Zuckerberg’s relationships with the network’s other founding members.
The film’s main tagline plays off of Zuckerberg’s recent Facebook milestone, “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”
I’d say Zuckerberg has a bit more than a few enemies.
Facebook has gone under a lot of reconstruction lately — some good, some not so good.
Besides the usual user interface overhaul, at the beginning of the summer a lot of privacy settings were changed as well as many users’ personal information was offered to third-party advertisers by Facebook.However, after a month or so of public scrutiny, it seemed Zuckerberg and crew got the social networking site’s privacy issues under control and did a better job making users aware of how to change them and to what level of security Facebook now offered.
The funny thing is — whether he meant to or not — Zuckerberg proved how hooked people are on what he has.
Throughout all these privacy leaks and site changes, the site continuing gaining new users. Sure, some may have left, but obviously the numbers weren’t too staggering, as evidenced by the new milestone reached a mere two months later.
Facebook has everyone so addicted, Zuckerberg and crew could do whatever they wanted to their site and people wouldn’t care. They’d still want to be a part of it.
You have to be careful what you put up on Facebook — and the Internet in general. Anybody can and will have access to anything they want to see, no matter how high you put the security settings.
So don’t be stupid and put pictures of yourself and your buddies drunk as a skunk for your boss to see. Too many people have been fired over that.
Also be careful on what you put in those notorious status updates — because they will find a way to come back and bite you in the ass.
Lecturing aside, Facebook is a fun way to stay connected with your friends. But keep in mind it is still the Internet we’re talking about and creeps and stalkers are out there.
All 500 million of them.
—-Contact Adam Arinder at [email protected].