Is Facebook Your Best Friend?

Most of us probably log in to Facebook several times a day. Some people never log out, and update constantly (are you one of those people? You need to get out more!)

Did you know this?

• More than 955 million people use FB every day
• 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded to FB every month
• The average number of friends is 130
• 10% of college admissions offices, when asked, said they check a person's FB when he or she has applied to that college
• 45% of employers surveyed indicated they checked social media use by job applicants*
• FB uses up 13.9 billion minutes of peoples' lives every year.
• Canadians use FB the most.

• If FB was a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world based on the number of accounts (about 500 million). That is close to double the number of people who live in the United States.
• In the United States, 54.7% of people ages 13 to 17 have FB accounts (How old is that statistic? It seems like that would be more like 90%)
• The new Word of the Year in 2009 was "unfriend"
• The average user of FB is on for 55 minutes a day. That's an average, probably not typical of people under age 30 or so.
• In Australia, legal notices can be served via FB
• Syria, China, Pakistan, India, and Viet Nam have banned FB temporarily or permanently
• The site was originally named "thefacebook"
• Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, created it for college students while he was a student at Harvard. He did not graduate, but has his status on FB as 'college graduate' because-according to him-the status 'dropout' isn't offered.

• Zuckerberg began with the idea to post pictures of fellow students so they could rate them as "hot" or "not" and got the pictures by hacking into the Harvard server (hence the 'Face Book'). Once discovered, he was threatened with expulsion but was not expelled.
• How does FB make money? With the advertising you see when you log on. People click on it and do business with those sites.

*Check this out about employers checking social media, and why they did or did not hire someone using the information they gleaned:
http://oregonbusinessreport.com/2009/08/45-employers-use-facebook-twitter-to-screen-job-candidates/

What did people ever do before Facebook?

They enjoyed the outdoors, read books, played games, made things, climbed trees, attended events, played music, played with pets, went to visit friends and relatives and had them come to visit, wrote letters, called people and talked, went exploring, went for walks, cleaned, went out to eat, and pondered life.

And, lucky us: these things are still available. How about trying one of them?