Thursday, January 6, 2011

Facebook Reaches 600 Million Users

Facebook, which only a couple of days ago was valued at $50bn (which seems obscene really) has now reached 600 million users worldwide. In fact this website is now so popular that some people are saying ridiculous things about it. Technology Blogger Paul Thurrott recently said on his podcast “I’m tired of Luddites and hold-outs. You need to be on Facebook, now. If you’re not, you do not exist.”

This is a frankly ridiculous statement, that because a lot of people find Facebook interesting that everyone else must jump on board the bandwagon or shut up complaining about the site. Windows LIve for instance now has in excess of 500 million users, but nobody would dream of saying, you must jump ship from GMail.

Let’s put things into perspective. I’m on Facebook as are all my friends, but the only reason we’re all there, and there’s broad agreement with us on this, is because there’s currently nowhere else like it for us to be. Facebook will eventually have it’s day in the same way that Friends Reunited did, it’s just going to take much longer for them as they have a far better business model, and Friends Reunited didn’t predict (who could) the social networking explosion, and they weren’t ready for it.

600 million users is a massive number, indeed it’s 10% of the total population of the planet. But if we currently have around 4 billion people with access to the Internet somehow, that leaves an enormous number off Facebook. For these people its personal choice (China aside obviously).

Facebook launched in February 2004 and has seen enormous success while at the same time being slammed repeatedly over privacy. It’s the golden child of the Internet though and like your own small children in that you can shout at it daily but you’d shoot anyone who tried to take it away from you!

It’s predicted that Facebook will reach 1 billion users by 2012 which is also great for the company. I genuinely believe though that if people decide that Facebook is not for them they should be left to get on with it and not spoken about in derogatory terms.

Taken from here

Sunday, January 2, 2011

European Mobile Charger Agreement Comes into Force Today

A voluntary agreement by all the major mobile phone manufacturers comes into force today in the EU, and because of the way phones are manufactured these days it’s bound to very quickly have positive repercussions around the world.

Under the agreement, all new phones announced from today for sale in the EU will have a standard micro-USB socket for charging the device.

The companies who have signed up to the measure, which is intended to reduce the number of chargers sold and discarded in Europe include Apple, Nokia, Qualcomm, HTC, RIM, LG, Motorola and Samsung.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts on Apple’s next iPhone as these phones have always carried proprietary hardware interfaces. Will the next iPhone switch entirely to micro-USB, will it have a micro-USB socket alongside the standard iPhone connector and will any change only affect handsets sold in the EU?

The move was initialised a year ago by the EU to try to reduce the overall carbon footprint and the amount of waste produced by the electronics industry and very quickly all the major manufacturers signed up. It means that within a year or two mobile phone companies will begin to sell phones without chargers, instead expecting consumers to either buy one separately or use the existing charger that came with their previous handset.

Some manufacturers including HTC have already been using micro-USB sockets for charging their handsets for a couple of years, indeed I’m now on my second HTC phone with such a socket and charger.

How this is taken by consumers who may resent having to buy a separate charger, or who may went to sell or give away their old phone and charger remains to be seen. The move is being broadly welcomed by governments across Europe however.

Taken from here