Half a billion and counting…

Yep, it’s official – Facebook has hit 500 million users, and the internet continues its struggle for dominance over our lives and minds. Quite frankly, I think it happened years ago, but I’m sure many people paranoid about how much time they really spend on social networking sites would love to disagree with me, especially in front of their line manager.

Sometimes, I wonder how big Facebook’s going to get, really. With Mark Zuckerberg due to appear on The Simpsons, Facebook’s fame will be cemented in history, a history that is now digitally catalogued, stored, and compiled into the amateur encyclopaedia that is Wikipedia. That being said, are we truly grateful to Facebook for what it’s done to the internet?

For one thing, it’s connected 500 million people, and you simply can’t disagree with that statistic. It’s an incredible achievement, and one that the forefathers of the World Wide Web would be proud to see occur. However, it also means 500 million people are slowly exposing more and more of themselves to their employers, rivals, the press and to the darker agents sifting through Facebook’s many groups and friend networks.

It’s like the six degrees of separation, only multiplied to the nth degree. People are losing their jobs after whining about their employers, but that’s only possible because they’re publicising the wrong parts of themselves. If you’re a high-profile businessman, that gallery of Bangkok pictures is probably a silly idea. Basic stuff, no?

It just proves we’re still learning when it comes to technology that made its debut less than a couple of decades earlier. People are still releasing potentially harmful information about themselves onto the web, other people (or, intelligence-wise, the same people, really) are buying the iPhone 4 despite the recorded flaws, and most still get Windows releases even though we know they won’t work near-perfectly for almost half a decade.

At the same time, we’re more connected than ever before, and this has advanced politics, social networking, business networking. Hell, I may not be the biggest advocate of Facebook around, but I respect and know the power of it, and my LinkedIn account helps me get recommendations I can then use when I’m bigging myself up somewhere else.

LinkedIn, however, is rather different to Facebook. There’s no gossip, no controversy, no intimate details, just pure business, and the odd brown-nosed recommendation from someone you’ve hardly worked with who’d like to be introduced to that CEO you know. It’s more competitive, more serious, and for that reason, far more likely to fail.

Look at society – down go the serious films, up come the comic book movies. Down goes the classic literature, up comes vampire novels. We’re entering into a paradise of fun, of not caring about the more serious ways of enjoying ourselves, and aiming instead for the appealing, the easy, the simply enjoyable and the indulgent warmth that comes with that.

For this reason, Facebook will, in my opinion, hit a billion users well before 2015. This sounds like a mind-bending figure, but it’s not. Once the tweens reach adulthood, and the ever-younger net users hit the right age to start surfing, we’ll see a generation of social networkers who don’t even know what a VHS is. Doesn’t that terrify you? Terrifies me, all right.