Facebook has actually made social connections more entertaining, rendering even some of my most boring relatives, friends, co-workers, and casual acquaintances a bit more interesting.

Now that Netflix chairman and CEO Reed Hastings has joined Facebook’s board, I’m wondering what’s going to be down the road of my life on Facebook.  Will I one day look up from my laptop and ask my wife to watch a movie or TV show on Facebook?

Clearly, as Facebook inches towards reaching 1 billion users sometime next year, it is looking for more and more ways to keep people logged in. Games are obvious time consumers and so is music.  Movies and TV?  Definitely. (Even if it means watching Green Lantern laying a big fat egg at the tills.)

As an additional revenue stream (which Facebook probably needs more than just traffic), perhaps it’ll lead to seamless social network TV/movie promotion that actually brings bigger bucks.  That will definitely come in handy, if and when, Facebook goes public next year and needs to support its profitability profile.

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Last year a young and pretty female former co-worker at the Office of Senator Richard Gordon got in touch with me through Facebook chat.  Although I initially savored the idea that the conversation was going to be somewhat purely social, talk eventually turned to one particular facet of everyone’s life online: Will prospective employers Google her and use the information they find to decide on whether or not to hire her?

Being somewhat the office’s second default expert on all things online, I said “Yes. Of course.”

If someone else had asked me the same question before Facebook became one of the biggest social networking sites on the planet, my answer would have been “No. Not unless you’ve been involved in a crime or scandal that was published on an online newspaper, blog or forum.”  The reason for this is that online newspapers, blogs, and forums used to be the most likely ones to turn up a person’s name.  Moreover, the more common reason for a person’s name to turn up on Google search would be either because they’ve been very good or very, very bad.

These days, anyone who has ever Googled themselves will know that their Facebook profile (along with LinkedIn, Twitter, Google profile, etcetera) will invariably turn up in the first ten search results.  This can be both a boon and a bane, most especially now after a company got the nod of the US Federal Trade Commission to screen job applicants based on their Facebook and Twitter postings. read more

Armand Nocum's Kristiyano Islam Peace Library

With more than 26 million users, the Philippines is the 7th largest country in terms of Facebook users according to Social Bakers.

While most people here use it to keep in touch with friends and family or play games, Facebook has become more than a diversion for at least one long time friend.

Armand Nocum, an acclaimed Filipino journalist who is now a legal public relations consultant, is making waves on Facebook that will hopefully help bring peace to his home island Mindanao.

Armand is the founder of the Kristiyano-Islam Peace Library (Kris), a non-government literacy advocacy group, that recently built at least one library in Zambonga City and another in Quezon City.  Apart from libraries, the advocacy group also funded scholarships, donated books, and organized medical missions.

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Epic Unfriend: Have 8 million Facebook users in US, Canada, and Europe pushed the deactivate button?

Facebook lost nearly 8 million active users in May this year and posted lower new user registrations in May, leading to speculations that the social networking giant’s target of reaching 1 billion users by February might take a bit longer.

Notwithstanding that Goldman partners put a stamp of approval on the $50 billion valuation for Facebook early this year, being the biggest and most active social networking site on the planet could provide strong support for appraisals of share prices should Facebook push through with an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2012.  That is if Facebook actually opens up more of its financial documents and trumps the vital signs of LinkedIn.

Apart from dreams of pouring over the Great Fire Wall of China like a tsunami and continuing to find new user growth in late adapter countries, there is the idea that Facebook’s ubiquitous presence through social media stream integration and comments on sites will continue to propel its growth in years to come.

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A couple of days ago, a Filipino TV show actor-director was stabbed ten times by someone he had met on Facebook and invited to sleep in his home.  Ricardo “Ricky” Rivero, 39 years old, was allegedly stabbed by Hans Ivan Ruiz, 22, whom Rivero met over Facebook five months ago.  Ruiz denies stabbing Rivero but a report from responding police say that when they arrived at the scene, they saw Ruiz clutching the actor-director’s bag, which contained a laptop, two cell phones and several personal items.

Usually, those accused of a crime will deny committing it, but what is strange about Ruiz’s denial are the details.  Here is an excerpt from a news report.

Ruiz maintained that he had no clue as to how Rivero sustained the stab wounds but said that it happened while he slept beside the actor-director. “We were sleeping when he started yelling, ‘Don’t stab me!’” he said.

Ruiz said that he saw a knife beside Rivero but did not know where it came from. “He thought I was the one who hurt him. I also thought he was going to kill me so we struggled over the knife,” he added.

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In his statement, Ruiz said that he offered to take the actor-director to the hospital, although police said Rivero drove himself to the hospital.

Now before people in mainstream news media over react and start pointing at Facebook as an inherently dangerous site to visit, here are some things to consider.

On the surface of it, it seems Facebook use was merely incidental to the commission of this crime.  The TV director might as well have met his alleged attacker through any other social networking site and invited him over to his house where the crime was committed. (Facebook would perhaps be more central if it involves swindling people out of their money and other types of fraud, certain types of coercion, identity theft, libel, and other such crimes.)

As to the idea of whether Facebook can become an enabler and hunting ground for criminal psychopaths, the idea is a bit trickier to prove.  I think even for a trained psychologist, it’s really difficult to say just on the basis of a news report whether psychopathic behavior had anything to do with the stabbing of the TV director by his Facebook friend.  Even given the fact that the newspaper account describes a number of characteristics of psychopathic personality and behavior, no real assessment can be made until the suspect is given proper evaluation.

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The diamond water paradox ought to be revised.  These days a couple hundred shares of stock in Google or perhaps Facebook next year, can be worth more than a good sized diamond and may in certain ways be as essential as the water we need to continue living.

Of course, we haven’t reached the point where you’d actually have to log-in to your Twitter or Facebook account to buy a bottle of water at a convenience store.

image from http://www.posmarket.com.au

Then again, there may actually be companies that are planning to integrate or have actually integrated Point of Sale systems (a.k.a cash registers) with either social networking websites.  The idea behind this is that when you purchase something from these companies, your purchase shows up as an update on your social network and that will perhaps, for a time, have an impact on the “conversations” you think you may be having with the world.  It’s kind of like Foursquare in a way but more directly tied up with actual purchases.

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One Billion Facebook Users in 2012 could mean a $100 Billion IPO Valuation

Of course, for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, it would mean the world and then some.

Perhaps the most important thing for Zuckerberg would be that he was right about his prediction.  When Facebook reached 500 million users last July, Zuckerberg said that it would be impossible for Facebook not to reach 1 billion users.

That’s roughly equivalent to 16 to 20 percent of the world’s population.  But that is not to say that there really are 1 billion Facebook users with one Facebook account each or that all of the 1 billion accounts are actually actively being used in a meaningful way.

Still, what if each Facebook user was actually worth $10 each?

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Some weeks back, the BBC reported that a 75-year-old woman from Georgia managed to disrupt Internet service in the entire country.  She didn’t do so with a DDoS or an LOIC or any other sophisticated hacking tool, but with a plain old saw.  To supplement her pension, the woman scavenges for copper.  The cable didn’t mean a whole lot of difference for her, but it did mean the temporary paralysis of Internet services in Armenia.

Could it happen here?  Of course it can.  All it took to temporarily shut down the Internet for an entire nation was an old woman with a saw.  What more for an earthquake in Taiwan, or a scavenger in Manila, or someone who trips a wire in the United States?

If there’s anything this story could tell us, all the hype and hoopla about “new media revolutions” seem to be so “up there;” out of the reach of the majority of the world’s population who are not yet “wired.”  It’s often grounded on something abstract, like ideas and conversations, when that entire reality is grounded on a very vulnerable network of wires.

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Late Sunday evening my Facebook news stream was bombarded with posts exclaiming Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed. An elite operation that required tactical precision took out Bin Laden and his supporters over the course of minutes. The raid was live streamed to the President and his cabinet but a very different picture unfolded over Twitter.

Around 1 AM as a US helicopter closed in on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, an IT consultant some miles away live Tweeted the entire raid unaware of what was really going on. Sohaib Athar under his handle @ReallyVirtual Tweeted that a helicopter was hovering around the area and later crashed from gun fire.

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Google recently introduced a new add-on to search results called +1. It’s not groundbreaking but it’s relevant and it’s not complicated but it’s too simple. Google +1 has its problems.

The problem with Google +1 is the entire implementation. Search and social have had an odd relationship: sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t. This is one of the cases where Google’s treading the social waters with a tool that’s useful for a small subset of users.

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