Posts Tagged facebook

Shush shush tweet tweet

Posted by Blanca in Current affairs on August 7, 2009

twitter meltdownMost of you probably experienced yesterday what was one the largest cyber attacks ever.  If not the most damaging it was certainly one of the most targeted, as it focused on social media websites.

Facebook was terribly slow all day, Twitter went completely down, and sites such as YouTube and Google’s Blogger were also affected.

And the rumor goes that it was all a plot to silence one blogger from writing posts on the Russian-Georgia conflict!

I really love a good conspiracy theory.  It makes me smile.

I also love the way some bloggers described the “crisis” as the morning when civilization almost ground to a halt as Twitter was hit by hackers.  It makes me chuckle.

And what I love most of it all is the way some people were posting on the few sites that were still up and running during the event on how they felt miserable, useless and how much they missed their Twitter friends.  It makes me want to laugh hysterically.

But the fact is that Twitter was launched in July 2006 and Facebook was launched in March 2007.  Which means that civilization started only three years ago and by definition (of those Twitter-lovers, not me) we must have been all useless and miserable before that!

Not sure if I was less civilized and more useless then.  But certainly I cannot be really miserable anymore with all that smiling, chuckling and laughing that the social media meltdown has brought to my life since yesterday!

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Why do I heart Facebook?

Posted by Blanca in Everything else on July 7, 2009

Confession: I am one of Facebook’s 225 million or so active users and one of the 100m who actually logs on at least once a day.

Do you care to know why?:

(1) I have used Facebook as part of the communication strategy on quite a few projects with great success. I love the fact that you have access to demographic information to target your message. Some say it’s pricey, but what I’ve seen is higher conversion rates and ROI than with Adwords.

(2) Links on Facebook are responsible for 95% of my personal blog’s traffic. It makes sense if you think that 19% of hits to Huffington Post blog come from FB links, and that they are also the number one driver of traffic to the Perez Hilton gossip site.

(3) I agree with Hala Gorani from CNN: nobody emails these days! Email is turning into the new snail mail. 80% of my emails are work-related. I don’t need to send an email to my friends to catch up; they can learn what I am hallucinating about from my blog and what I am up to … on Facebook! (that one works both ways, of course – the ‘what are they up to’, not the hallucinating part).

Facebook is getting more hits these days than Yahoo, and despite the unexpected rise of ‘rival’ Twitter in the last months, FB’s user numbers keep growing quickly (more than half of the users have signed up in the last year!)

Having said all of the above, I have one complaint: Why is ‘Facebook’ marked as a spelling mistake every time I type it on anything MS and on Blogger, when the word ‘Google’ is not?!

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