facebook junkie

Ever wonder when the light blue bird will land on the dark blue face????.... It's very hard right now for twitter to become profitable, because of that I think someone will eventually buy off twitter, the same deal as when google bought youtube (only a few billions less).

By now you’ve undoubtedly been tagged at least once for that “25 Random Things About Me” Facebook note that has spread across the social networking sphere like some kind of self-revelatory virus. Love it or hate it, its rapid proliferation is unprecedented in social networking’s young history — Facebook reports that nearly 5 million notes were created by its users during the week of January 26 through February 2, which was more than double the amount from the previous week and more than any other week in the company’s history.

But still, no one seems to be able to get to the bottom of who actually started it, or why Facebook users are suddenly so enamored with this particular means of sharing both intensely personal and highly mundane details about themselves with hundreds of friends and acquaintances in their news feeds. “We don’t have specific data on the types of Notes users are creating, but we think this growth has a strong correlation to the sharing of the 25 Random Things About Me Note,” wrote Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker in an email message. “Other types of content, like photos or news stories, have spread rapidly and widely on Facebook, but this is the first time I’ve noticed a Note gain such distribution.”

Complete story here.

If your facebook addiction has grown to a point where you can't control it and you'd like to quit for good then you should consider closing your facebook account. This is a multi-step process. If you just go and deactivate your account it will deactivate it but it will leave all of your information in place, it just won't show it. So if you decide in the future to reactivate it, then you have everything intact.

If you really wan't to quit facebook and remove all of your personal info from facebook then you should follow these steps:

1. Remove every friend
2. Leave any groups that you either started or joined
3. Leave all networks
4. Delete all of your photos and photo albums
5. Delete every single message from your wall
6. Erase every comment you've ever made
7. Delete all of your messages and notifications
8. Erase all of the info from your profile
9. Remove any apps that you've added
   
10. Deactivate the account
    

Here is a cool youtube video about Facebook Addiction

More and more people seem to become addicted to Social Media networks, specially facebook. What is it that makes us stare at those blue profiles on facebook so much?, is it a spell?.

Facebook has a great user experience overall compared to the other Social Media hubs, for example hi5 is full of crappy apps, overformatted user profiles that scream out at you and a bunch of kids just looking for attention. One of the features I like most about facebook is that you can't change your profile layout & colors, some people find this annoying but it keeps things really slick.

So you go ahead and tell us, why is facebook so addictive for you? leave us a comment....

Studying to become a facebook junkie?, here are the required courses:

Facebook For Dummies

Facebook: The Missing Manual

I'm on Facebook--Now What???: How to Get Personal, Business, and Professional Value from Facebook

The Facebook Book

Facebook Application Development (Programmer to Programmer)

10. You feel popular when someone "tags" you in a photo (it shows others that you do actually get out).
9. The mini-feed was a hot topic of discussion for a while among your friends.
8. You think "poking" is a valid form of flirting.
7. You have Facebook "friends" that you've never met in person.
6. As soon as you meet someone in real life, you go home to search for them on Facebook.
5. You feel cheated now that everyone can join.
4. You have pressured someone to join just so you can "friend" them.
3. You think your image is controlled by your profile picture.
2. You've created a group and evangelized everyone to join.
1. You think that wishing someone "happy birthday" on their wall is sufficient.

And as a bonus...

0. You want to be the first Facebook dating "success story."

Here are some tips to avoid becoming a facebook junkie:

1. Keep a list of your Facebook schedule (if you have one) and your non-Facebook goals with you and in front of you at all times.
2. Once you've discovered your capacity for being addicted to Facebook, you should probably avoid other social networking sites like MySpace.
3. As with any task that involves discipline, it always helps to do it with a friend. One option is to have a trusted family member or friend do this for you.
4. For those who found out you can re-activate your account, try this before you de-activate your account: Open up notepad and type in some random text (lskdjfd). Login to Facebook and change your password. Copy the text that you just typed in notepad in the password fields and change your password. Deactivate your account, and clear your clipboard history.
5. If you are looking for a way to actively decrease the frequency of your Facebook visits, change your password to a long string of numbers. Write this down on a piece of paper, and place it somewhere that is annoying to reach or out of reach. This way, whenever you want to log on, you will need to dig out the paper for your password. This is to deter you from logging on by making it a chore. If you start to remember the numbers, just repeat the process.
6. To keep updated about your Facebook friends' status updates, subscribe to your friends' status updates RSS feed in your email program or other RSS reader that you already use. For example, you can get this feed in MS Outlook 2007 where you can read what your friends are up to along with your email. This eliminates one major reason people regularly log in to Facebook.

(photo by mmarchin)

1. Work has become a nice break from Facebook, rather than the other way round.

2. When you're not on Facebook, you're trawling the internet for a new job as you're convinced you'll be sacked for excessive Facebooking very soon.

3. The first thing you think when you are fired for excessive Facebooking is, 'Great, now I can spend more time on Facebook.'

4. You've become a Facebook pusher. "Try it once, you'll love it..." you say to networking virgins.

5. You obsessively check your friends'/ex-boyfriends'/total strangers' list of friends to see if they have more than you. And if they do...

6. ...you become a friend thief. Who cares if you don't know them? All's fair in love and Facebook war...

7. The last time you had any intimate contact was when you were 'poked' by some guy you haven't seen for two years. Actual sex is so last century.

8. You've just spent the last hour looking at photos of someone you don't even know.

9. When it comes to meeting people, if they're not 'on' they're not worth bothering with. Who needs real friends when you're trying to reach the elusive 150 mark with your virtual ones?

10. You forget your best friend's birthday but you figure she'll be perfectly happy if you 'gift' her a cocktail and a Happy Birthday balloon.

11. You've had three group invites this morning but seem to be having yet another quiet night in tonight.

12. You turn down a night out at the pub quiz to play Scrabulous. Its a game, you're playing it with a friend and having a drink while you do it. What's the difference?

13. When it comes to solving real-life problems, your Magic 8 Ball application has made decision making easy. So what if you were in love with the guy it told you to dump? Plenty more fish in the Facebook sea...

14. You haven't had a food fight for ten years but now your day isn't complete until you've thrown something at a friend. It's a sign of affection, you know.

15. You're dreading your holiday because you can't face going cold turkey.

General Growth

• More than 120 million active users
• Facebook is the 4th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)

User Demographics

• Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities

Applications

• No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore)
• More than 10 billion photos uploaded to the site
• More than 30 million photos uploaded daily
• More than 6 million active user groups on the site

International Growth

• Our Translation Application is first step for us in helping users all over the world connect and share information with those that matter the most to them – wherever they live and in whatever language they choose
• In a little over five months, we have released the site in more than 20 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Russian and Korean. Our goal is to offer Facebook in as many languages as possible, as quickly as possible.

Platform

• More than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs
• Over 24,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

Source: facebook.com

Cool video from Videojug.com

Here are some signs that you need to spend less time on Facebook:

• changing your profile picture over and over
• updating your status more than once an hour
• accessing Facebook through a mobile device
• having too many profile applications
• using Facebook terms in your normal vocabulary

Or maybe are just not spending enough :)