Facebook is expected to say this week that it has reached 500 million users, making it the biggest information network on the Internet in a meteoric rise that has connected the world into an online statehood of status updates, fan pages and picture exchanges.
In its six-year history, the site has become ritualized in our daily lives. It has even attracted the unwilling who join for fear of being cut out of the social fabric. It has connected old friends and family. It has helped make and break political campaigns and careers. It has turned many of us into daily communicators of one-line missives on the profound and mundane. And it has tested the limits of what we care to share and keep private.
The sheer impact and sized of the Facebook universe has captured the attention of federal regulators and lawmakers who are struggling to protect consumers and their privacy as they flock to this and other sites like Twitter. The privately held company that still thinks of itself as a startup is also learning how to handle the new responsibilities that its massive trove of information about its half billion users brings .
“As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows, and the number of third-party companies and advertising networks with access to such information grows, it is important that consumers understand how their data is being shared and what privacy rules apply,” wrote David Vladeck, head of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, in a letter last January to the privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy and Information Center.
The milestone will be celebrated, according to The Wall Street Journal, by a public relations campaign with users sharing stories of how Facebook has affected their lives. And the half-billion-membership mark has captured the attention of Hollywood, with Sony Pictures set to release "The Social Network," a movie on Facebook's origins in October.
The half-billion-member-mark can’t be understated. To put the number into perspective, the population inhabiting Facebook now equals that of the United States, Japan and Germany combined. Or, two Mexicos and a Brazil. The universe of Facebook membership is less than half the population of India, but in the last year the social networking Internet site has doubled in size.
A Facebook spokesman declined to comment for this post. (Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board.)
The Silicon Valley Web site is now the biggest online trust of our vacation photos, electronic rolodexes, and recordings of how we felt about President Obama’s candidacy for president, the ban on headscarves in France and the Lindsay Lohan’s rollercoaster ride with sobriety. Seventy percent of users are outside the U.S., and one-quarter of all users are checking in and updating their pages from their cell phones.
And now Facebook is grappling with the growing pains that come with its influence. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 26, created the company out of his dorm room at Harvard University just six years ago. The firm recently moved its headquarters from University Avenue in Palo Alto to a bigger campus on Page Mill Road.
“A big part of the challenge that we’ve had is that we’ve grown from tens of thousands of users to hundreds of millions,” Zuckerberg said in a news conference on privacy policy changes last May. “It’s been a big shift along the way, and it hasn’t always been smooth.”READ MORESegún The Wall Street Journal, la empresa de Silicon Valley prepara una campaña de publicidad para celebrar su meta en la que mostrará 200 historias verdaderas que relatarán cómo usuarios han encontrado el amor de sus vidas, han expresado su dolor o han colaborado en desastres naturales a través de esta red social.
Los 500 millones de personas conectadas a facebook, que en el último año ha doblado su tamaño según The Washington Post, significa una población igual de grande a las de los Estados Unidos, Japón y Alemania juntos.
Ese universo procesa a diario fotografías, comentarios, mensajes, vídeos, noticias y casi todo lo que se puede compartir en la red, una especie de biblioteca virtual donde cabe todo y organizada en torno a los antojos espontáneos de millones de usuarios y sus conexiones de amigos.
Su popularidad ha crecido internacionalmente a pesar de denuncias y polémicas sobre los derechos de privacidad de sus usuarios que han llevado a la compañía a redefinir sus sistemas, sobre todo a partir de unos cambios que introdujo el pasado diciembre y que tuvo que rectificar parcialmente a raíz de las críticas.
Aún así, su impacto ha atraído hasta a las cámaras de Hollywood y en octubre la productora de cine Sony Pictures prepara el estreno de una película de la historia de sus orígenes, The Social Network.
El fundador de la empresa, Mack Zuckerberg, de 26 años, es uno de los protagonistas retratados en el filme como un estudiante en su segundo año en la Universidad de Harvard que pensó en esta web en la habitación de su residencia estudiantil.
Fuente: EFE - http://voices.washingtonpost.com
