To Facebook or not

Big news headlines: 

Log off! As Facebook plans a $5bn stock market float, one trenchant sceptic describes how the social network is ruthlessly selling your soul

Does this social networking site turn you into a product and does it make your friendships, marriages and children into a product? 

 

So, now the big question...do you continue to have a profile on Facebook or is just the success of a business and now we must take it down? We all know the story behind Facebook.  Originally called thefacebook, Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time. In August 2005, thefacebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

And now, we ask ourselves, the people who helped launch Facebook.  "The profiles,"  I will call us...why wouldn't we want to purchase stock in this profound venture?  Some of you (so I've heard) will delete your profile, others plan on replicating themselves like Dolly the sheep and still some of you remain 'OFF of Facebook' all together.  

What percentage of the world is not on Facebook?  After doing a bit of research, calculations and Googling...I found that as of today based on the population of the world, the 2010 census, computer owners and the earth's rotation...the answer is: 6.5 billion

10 reasons why you won't quit Facebook according to Business Week:

1. You're not going to go back to waiting an hour to send an email to 30 people with 40 photos attached.

2. How will you remember anybody's birthday?

3. How will you stalk your college boyfriend's new fiance?
 

4. Without Facebook what are you going to do when you don't have a friend's email address or phone number?

 

5. Forget Facebook? 80 million of you are addicted to Zygna's Facebook game, FarmVille.

6. It takes 2 seconds to "join" a new site through Facebook Connect. It can take a good 10 minutes doing it the old way. (Care to subscribe to these magazines?)

7. How will you hear about parties? How will you remember where and when those parties are? Evite?

8. You don't care about Mark Zuckerberg's sometimes sketchy past.

9. Sure, Facebook has privacy issues, but you don't care about privacy anymore. Remember when you wouldn't use your real name on the Internet?

10. You've never quit before. Remember those darn news feeds?  People are voyeurs, not even if you don't want to, you can't help but to scroll down and find out what others are doing.  You complain about their posts but you read them don't you?

10 reasons why you will quit Facebook according to Business Week's naysayers or why you just aren't on now:

 1. If I want to upload photos, I am going to upload them to Picasa or something similar, then email a link to there.

2. I will store them in any of a hundred fully functional and free calendar applications that are out there to remember birthdays.

3. Honestly, I think I can handle life with a little less stalking activity in it. In fact, I think it might be good for me.

4. I happen to have the email addresses of all of my (real) friends. If I wanted to contact someone and I didn't have any contact information for them, I guess I would do what I did before we were friends on Facebook: track it down. Mutual friends? White pages? Come on. I have the email addresses of anybody that I have emailed, has emailed me, or has been cc:d on an email that I have received, in the past few years. I can find them easily in Gmail. Am I supposed to be frightened to death of the possibility of not being able to contact somebody that I used to be "friends" with on Facebook?

5. Being addicted to FarmVille is a reason to leave Facebook, not to stay!

6. I don't care to subscribe to news feeds/magazines. I already get too much crap in my inbox as it is.

7. I have never once gone to an event that I was invited to on Facebook. How about that? I have gone to multiple events I was invited to on Evite.

8. Most days, I don't care the slightest bit of Zuckerberg or the history behind Facebook and those spoiled brats from Harvard.

9. I do care about privacy. 

10. I've quit many things in my life, and Facebook won't be the last.