To Facebook or Not to Facebook!

Ramai yang bertanya kenapa hang tak de lagi Facebook. Ada juga yang terperanjat, bila aku sebut tak berminat (buat masa ni). Facebook antara aplikasi web2.0 (ada yang sebut 3.0) yang paling melonjak naik waktu ini - tak kira muda mahupun tua!

Dengan Facebook, Obama berinteraksi dengan generasi muda - menuju Rumah putih. Dell khabarnya pula merekrut pekerja dengan facebook. Dan banyak lagi "success stories" facebook.

Edisi terbaru Fortune memberi fokus pada facebook.

Tertarik dengan artikel yang d siar majalah Fortune berkenaan Facebook. Bagaimana drop out kolej boleh merangka aplikasi yang menarik minat jutaan "pengikut" dalam masa yang singkat - 150 juta pengguna dalam masa 5 tahun, suatu pencapaian yang cukup menakjubkan!

Yang menjadi tertarik bukan kejayaan Mark Zuckerberg yang baru berusia 24 tahun (ada apa pada nama ya).

Yang membuat aku tertarik ialah kalimat ini:

His ultimate goal is less poetic - and perhaps more ambitious: to turn Facebook into the planet's standardized communication (and marketing) platform, as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional - and indispensable. Your Facebook ID quite simply will be your gateway to the digital world, Zuckerberg predicts.

He called Facebook a "social utility" and explained that one day everyone would be able to use it to locate people on the web - a truly global digital phone book.

But Zuckerberg makes it clear to me that he's still intensely focused on connecting the entire world on Facebook - only now his vision goes well beyond the site as a digital phone book. It becomes the equivalent of the phone itself: It is the main tool people use to communicate for work and pleasure. It also becomes the central place where members organize parties, store pictures, find jobs, watch videos, and play games. Eventually they'll use their Facebook ID as an online passkey to gain access to websites and online forums that require personal identification. In other words, Facebook will be where people live their digital lives, without the creepy avatars.

Needless to say, marketers would love to tap into that information. "If there are 150 million people in a room, you should probably go to that room," says Narinder Singh, chief product officer for Appirio, which helps big companies like Dell and Starbucks find ways to connect with users over the site. "It's too attractive a set of people and too large a community for businesses to ignore."

Yet because businesses haven't yet effectively infiltrated Facebook, its users may be under the mistaken impression that they aren't under surveillance. "What I like is that it doesn't bombard you with advertisements, so it feels really personal," says Heather Rowley, a 35-year-old photographer in Berkeley. It seems inevitable that some members will feel betrayed or uneasy when ads based on casual chats with friends start to appear on their feeds.

Sudah banyak juga pros dan cons Facebook yang d temui. Aku masih belum yakin untuk terjun ke alam maya Facebook.

Apalagi selepas membaca buku Don Tapscott, Grown up Digital (buku ini adalah hasil kajian yang melibatkan kos USD4 juta dan 11,000 anak muda yang aktif d dunia Internet - d gelar Net Geners):

Net geners are making a serious mistake, and most of them don't realize it. They're giving away their personal information on social networks and elsewhere and in doing so are undermining their future privacy. They tell me they don't care; it's about sharing. But here I must speak with the voice of experience.

Mengambil kata-kata Abu Saif (bukan Ustaz Hasrizal), pakar jejak net sekuriti: social networking adalah salah satu "cover up" untuk operasi pihak tertentu.

I leave it to your imagination!