Facebook and Julius Malema have a few things in common. The first, and probably most obvious, is that at one stage in South Africa you could not visit a newspaper website without some or other article about Julius Malema. Facebook has that now as well, but on an International scale. Because of an IPO now going to exceed us$100 Billion, the whole world is abuzz, about Facebook. Why you should buy shares (not that you could, you will only chase up the price after trade starts) and why you should not buy shares, what is the future of Facebook and why is it the very best thing since sliced bread. And why Facebook will fail. Many of these opinions are nothing more than frenzied sharks feasting on the spectacular success of a website.
What are the facts, why is Facebook so great? Everything hinges on popularity.
Julius Malema has been compared to many things and people, one being Hitler. Julius Malema can whip a crowd of people into a hypnotic frenzy as fast as Hitler could, he has amazing In terms of his vocal talent as well as his amazing ability to completely entrance and mesmerize vast crowds of people. Dangerous that is, yoda would think, specially if to the dark side he would go, as he in fact has by singing for white Afrikaans people to be killed.
Facebook, similarly has just taken over completely as everyone (and sometimes their dog), has a Facebook account. Google Plus, arguably is much better developed with a far better interface and user navigation, or does it? This is the thing: Opinions drive users, drives popularity, drives 100Billion dollars. Myspace is all but a distant memory, yet they still have millions of users, Google plus is battling to gain popularity because Facebook already occupies so much space. Some IT specialists opine that Facebook is a fad, some say that it is going to take over the world.
If you are a serious consumer and want to form an informed opinion, you should look at the data (and the big data). Google makes big data available to all people, free of charge and even gives us tools and applications to analise big data.
We all know that Yahoo does bad bad things and that the real unspoken reason why Yahoo keeps on failing is because Yahoo does not conform, live and exemplify good netizenship. The techies of the Internet is not behind Yahoo and secretly some cannot wait for Yahoo to get smaller and smaller and smaller until it becomes completely irrelevant, which it is fast becoming. Yahoo has the great staff, the capital backing, the resources and well, everything. Yet why does it keep on failing? It does not have the heart of the Internet behind it. Techies are mostly still neutral towards Facebook, Facebook uses PHP, they are code hackers (uh, yes, the ‘good’ hackers), they are techies, like us and although we are not so very sure that they are not evil, we are also not so convinced that they are. We know Google is not evil, yet of late Google, which is loved by techies of all sizes, has become a bit like a loving elephant. You can love the elephant and it does not mean to stand on you, it just did not see you. No worries, you are a gnat in the multiverse anyhoo, so it’s all good.
Will Facebook be great? Easy answer: It could be if it does nothing evil and keeps on having a hacker culture of having to disassemble, understand and re-engineer.
