I was logged in on my Orkut account one fine day when I found that one of my friends is no more in my friend’s list. Upon inquiring her via mobile message, she told that she has quit Orkut and now uses Facebook because of better privacy policies, in fact I would say because of the existence of privacy policies which were not available on Orkut. That was a year ago. Gradually I found that not only her but my other friends were also switching to Facebook. Some deleted their Orkut account permanently and started their social life on Facebook while others remained inactive users of Orkut and became active members of Facebook. Continuing my social life on Orkut, another day a stranger scraped me tell him about myself and upon rejecting his request he abused me on my scrapbook and I did not know it until my friends told me to delete the filthy scrap. With such an experience, I also got convinced to leave Orkut then and upon my friends suggestions I joined them on Facebook. Like me, there are number of other people who had such experience on Orkut and were force to abandon an insecure and exposed social life. That was true. Orkut, a social networking website which emerged in February, 2004 had no privacy policies for its users. People could see your profile, your photos and videos, which you most probably would not want to share with everyone, could read your scrapbook where your friends would leave their personal messages for you and could also write anything to you even if you don’t want to talk to them. They could even copy your photos and videos and exploit them and you would never what’s being done with them. Thus, users were free to intervene in your personal life without your consent. Besides privacy issues, several other controversies aroused from time to time such as hate groups focusing racism and religion which turned out into big court cases against Google; Invisible profiles and Flooding of spams. From 2006 to 2008, Orkut has been struck by worms and other malicious software that lead the Orkut users’ PC to a complete crash most of which was created by Brazilian masterminds. In the initial year of its launch, Orkut gained a lot of popularity and acquired maximum users from US but due to such unsafe and insecure environment, Orkut lost its name and fame though it has now included privacy for its users and taken actions to prevent such incidents. Facebook which is a similar Social Networking platform though also came in 2004 but kept consideration for its users from the start. It developed a trust between its users and itself for keeping their information private. As compared to Orkut, Facebook allows its users to have a control of who can see their profile, their information, photos, videos and their activities; whether they want to appear in someone’s search results or not and can even block a person completely with whom you don’t want to have any sort of interaction. Providing users with such safety measures, Facebook has earned a repute of lasting trust world wide and has maintained that trust for years to present. The proof is the increase in the number of its users after every few months. In July, 2009 the number of Facebook members reached over250 million from over 200 million in April, 2009. Recently on 27th August, 2009, Facebook announced to improve their privacy policies after working with the Office of the Privacy Commission of Canada for a year.
I think Facebook is definitely on the rise. I'm in UK a couple of year back my friends were using Myspace, now there is no one on that now and there's like ten times more people I know locally on Facebook. It does bring certain privacy issues to people though. About the future, well I dare say something new may come along at some point but I think it will be about for a while
i have an account in facebook, im using it for a long time. for me there's no problem with that social site
I think facebook will Have Great future, and it will not face any Downfall as they are updating it really great so will not get bored
I wonder what will happen when parents start a Facebook page for their babies before anyone else gets their name....
Thats genious! I am loving it already I just started a facebook profile for my son that hasn't been born yet.... just kidding!!!! Come one people Facebook is cool and all but not a means of communications, what happened to human interaction? Any one see the move Wall-E from Disney? Lack of human interaction could lead to fat lazy people... wait a minute we are fat, lazy... so i guess we are all doomed huh?
I hear FaceBook is getting a lot of good employees and I think it will be around longer than MySpace. MySpace was more of a fad and had too many problems. FaceBook is much cleaner and well done in my opinion and has a lot of professionals, the college crowd and adults. MySpace is really just for younger people now.
I think all great things will come to an end eventually. Social media is hot how, but within 5-10 years it'll be a thing of the past.
It will be a thing of the past but not until there is a perfect alternative. You have to remember that it is instinct, and in fact it is a basic need, for humans to socialize.
MySpace vs. Facebook? Are you joking me?!?! Come on guys.... There is absolutely no comparison. Facebook dominates the social scene on the web right now and with the moves they are making with features like FB Connect, they are expanding their grasp to the rest of the Internet as well. Did you know that 2 days ago Facebook also announced FB Connect support for mobile applications as well? Yes, Facebook is where it's at right now, and it is due in large part to the vast amount of privacy controls available to users. Users can even set it up so certain people on your Friend list won't see anything you post on FB unless you post it directly on THEIR wall, while at the same time granting these people access to your profile information, this is just one example of millions of possible security configurations Facebook gives to users....
Well said...Facebook is simply a far superior platform to Myspace. Myspace sat around their hands for far too long, while Facebook kept innovating and innovating to the point where Myspace missed the boat. Just do a traffic comparison between these two sites on your favorite analysis site (Quantcast, compete.com, alexa, etc) and the results speak for themselves...
For now Facebook really is the number one, but the problem Facebook is struggling with is their applications system, there are simply to many things to do on Facebook, to me it somehow lost it is sense. (Nevertheless I still have an account there of course as it is currently still raising). But I see Facebook failing in about 5 years I guess because at that time we are going to have an new trend for online profiles (twitter is a social network as well but it makes sense to have both, Twitter and facebook).
I always thought the opposite - personally, I never use Twitter now that Facebook has that new dashboard. I have no reason to - everyone I know/knew is connected to my Facebook account and I can do so much more with it than I can with Twitter.
Facebook is the top social networking site. Facebook has a lot of features that users love. Plus it is a big market for advertisers. With more than 250 million registered users, Facebook will stay on top for a long time.
facebook is on its way to the top of the social networking sites...it continuous to improve its features and its services...