Member Article

Life without Facebook or Twitter by Anand Ramdeo of Planned Departure

No one would deny that social media has created the biggest social shift since the industrial revolution. The two biggest game-changers to date have been Facebook and Twitter both of which started life in slightly different versions to their now well-known platforms.

Facebook, which was launched in February 2004 and developed by 23 year old Mark Zuckerberg, was not a totally original concept. Prior to Facebook there was Facesmash which was started in 2000, and centred on the concept of a game based on pictures. The way it worked was simple. Compare two students’ pictures side by side and pick who was hot or not. A bit shallow but a trend many recent apps still adhere to, think tinder, lovoo and badoo. Facebook came on the scene, and the rest as they say, is history!

According to Statisticbrain the total number of monthly active Facebook users are 1,310,000,000. In 2008 Facebook had 100 million users and as of March 2013 had 1.11 Billion. Facebook filed for a $5 billion IPO on February 1st 2012 and valued the company at $104 billion.

Twitter on the other hand started life as an SMS mobile phone-based platform but over the years it grew into a web platform. It was co-founded by web developer Jack Dorsey and three other founders; Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass. Created in March 2006, it launched in July 2006.

The main ideology behind Twitter was to create a platform of communication for businesses but again as it grew it evolved to something for the general public, businesses and individuals.

According to Statisticbrain, there are a 645,750,000 total number of active registered Twitter users and 9,100 tweets are tweeted every second.

These figures alone clearly demonstrate that both Facebook and Twitter have become important digital assets to those who own accounts. Something which I had not really given much thought to until recently when I accidentally changed my personal profile to a fan page. I instantly thought I had lost everything. Let me elaborate.

I have been a member of Facebook since 2008. I have uploaded pictures, shared and been tagged in various pictures and posts since then. Without realising it Facebook had become an online archive and album for me. Pictures of the birth of my god-children, nephews, nieces, graduation and concerts are all on there. But I never valued them as much as I should till I thought I had lost them for good. Thankfully Facebook support team came to my rescue and restored the page from a fan page to a profile again and that is when I realised, how in the blink of an eye all those memories could have vanished. I had not stored them on an online drive or a drive at home because in my head I thought my Facebook account would always be there.

It certainly made me realise the value of properly storing all these memories.

Most of online storage facilities are free such as Dropbox and iCloud. Depending on the space or bytes you require, you might decide to buy more space on these drives.

All your relevant information regarding your Facebook; passwords, security questions and your pictures can all be saved in your E-vault. It also serves as a backup system for relevant information stored. For example, if your computer crashed and your documents are saved on an external drive you wouldn’t panic or if your Facebook account got deleted all those pictures wouldn’t vanish for good.Some of these storage facilities such as Planned Departure go a step further in terms of their clients delegating beneficiaries who can have access to this information in case something happened and you could no longer access or manage your account.

Storing those memories may be something you only think about doing when you have lost them, as Donald Rumsfeld said ‘Think ahead, don’t let day-to-day operations drive out planning.’

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Janine Wood .