Facebook is presently making some preparations regarding a certain announcement. The announcement is actually about the fact that this particular social networking website has finally amassed around half a billion active friends, which is pretty much a milestone in reinforcing its status as the big king of all social networks.
To date, Facebook is regarded as the one and only company that houses the power as well as the seriousness of Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and Google, all put together.
For sure, it has already been proven and established to everyone that Facebook is not just a fad, especially wits its five hundred million followers, and rising. In fact, many believe that is has become a cultural force that somehow shapes today’s collective culture. Even if others are not at all interested in setting up a profile of their own, they really cannot deny that they will become a bit oddly defined in a negative light, and will be, of course, left out of the zeitgeist.
The services that are as huge as the ones provided by Facebook will surely not disappear any time soon, although it is a big doubt that they will be disappearing at all. Despite the fact that Facebook has hit its plateau in the United States, it is still booming. Today’s Internet users are actually quite fickle and the short history of the Web indicates that dozens and dozens of websites have started out high-flying and are now dead, such as Geocities. Some are still present but have now lost its luster, just like what happened to Yahoo. Also, some have faded into pitiful irrelevance, such as Friendster.
Many are wondering how Facebook can possibly lose its place, especially around this time that it is at the center of the Internet world.
Some say that a huge contribution to such occurrence would be the sudden emergence of open and distributed alternatives. A group of college geniuses have tinkered with Free Software and was able to launch a federated alternative to Facebook with an open source. They called this new creation of theirs Diaspora.
With Diaspora, they were able to collect as much as a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in donations. And, soon after, they were able to knock out code. Aside from Diaspora, there are also new cool stuffs that are emerging, such as OneSocialWeb, WebFinger, and Appleseed Project. These are open protocols that have been molded into relatively decent shapes. Soon enough, someone will be building them into a highly powerful stack that is quite improbable. For those who are still confused about these other Facebook alternatives that are emerging nowadays, just take a look at LAMP stack.
This new techie creation is quite amazing since it eliminates the need of having to create a centralized home, just like your email. You can also now interact with virtually any profile that can be found on the Internet, in your own terms, of course.
Although this may sound a bit far-fetched right now, a poll that was only recently done have suggested that people today are much happier with Facebook, as compared to their experiences with their own cable company, despite the fact that they all find both services equally indispensable.
