Zuckerberg is TIME’s Person of the Year (Facebook)
by Asha
Zuckerberg connects a “twelfth of humanity” in his giant online social network, which if it were “a country would be the third-largest, behind only China and India”.
Zuckerberg deserves to be person of the year for “connecting more than half-a-billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live”.
Facebook is the internet’s intranet, a members-only club much like corporate internal information-sharing, except much cooler.
Facebook, as Time pointed out, has merged with the social fabric of human life.
Indeed. Facebook has become a verb – as in, “I’ll Facebook you later” – which is the way to greatness, as in Xerox it or Google it. When your brand becomes a verb, that’s ayoba.
There were people who did things this year, things in the real world. Or survived against amazing odds, like the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped underground for two months.
As @DeathStarPR, one of my favourite spoof Twitter accounts, wrote: “Mark Zuckerberg wins Time person of the year. Runners-up: some guys who got stuck in a cave. Pretty stiff competition there, Zuckerberg.”
Not bad for seven years’ work by 26-year-old Zuckerberg, the world’s youngest billionaire who has already vowed to give half of it away. He has lived through the site’s early years, and allegations he stole the idea from friends, in the form of The Social Network, a tell-all movie that is now, bizarrely, in the running for Oscar honours. Imagine, Zuckerberg is Time’s person of the year and his life story wins an Oscar, in the same year.
This year, Facebook began with 350million users; now it’s on 550million. Facebook is the glue that holds the internet together. In South Africa, there are about 3.45million users, 7% of the population but 55% of all local internet users, according to researchers World Wide Worx.
Social networking has come of age this year. Facebook is by far the best example of how cloud-based computing has matured in 2010. That, Twitter, the rise of the app and Android were the big bets I made in my first column of the year. Thank God I’ve had more luck than I have predicting the outcome of Springbok Tests.
Twitter is now a runaway success, having signed up 175million users and being valued at R25-billion this month. I can’t imagine my life without it – and the superb tip-off service it is. Twitter isn’t a social network, it’s an information network.
No one could see it back at the beginning of the year, but this would be the year that broadband prices tumbled. New competition from undersea cable Seacom led to MWEB taking the plunge and offering uncapped ADSL, a first in the country and one that is the global standard. South Africa’s internet grew up just a little more.
Amazingly enough, we have the bizarre situation that a cellphone operator, Vodacom, has more broadband subscribers (2million) than the fixed-line operator (Telkom with 700000).
Interconnect, the fee that operators pay each other to connect a call to their network, was reduced by former communications minister Siphiwe Nyanda before he was sacked.
By far the strangest figure to emerge was that 3% of all Twitter traffic is somehow related to Justin Bieber. Truth, as always, is stranger than fiction.