i be naija

At a thanksgiving party hosted by a friend recently, there was a noticeable frenzy to take, and be in, photographs. Apparently, everyone knew that the pictures would inevitably end up on Facebook and it seemed everyone wanted to ensure that they were properly represented. True enough, while the photographing was going on, one of our other friends was on … Facebook. Such was the fever that our host remarked, “Facebook will soon consume everybody’s life.” We all laughed.

Of course, this is no laughter matter… I’m still grappling with the Facebook phenomenon myself:

2004

• Three Harvard nerds (led by Mark Zukerberg) found “The Facebook”
• 09/ the owners of ConnectU file suit against FB, alleging that Zukerberg stole source code from them
• FB receives ~ $0.5M from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel in an angel round
• 12/ FB’s user base exceeds one million

2005

• 05/ FB raises $12.8M in venture capital from Accel Partners
• 08/ FB buys the domain name facebook.com from the Aboutface Corporation for  $0.2M
• 10/ FB’s expansion trickles down to most small universities and junior colleges in the United States, Canada, and the UK

2006

• 03/ BusinessWeek reports a potential acquisition of FB. FB reportedly declines an offer of $750M; it is rumored the asking price was as high as $2B
• 04/ Peter Thiel, Greylock Partners, and Meritech Capital Partners invest an additional $25M in FB
• FB launches an API that allows the development of applications to be used on the site, known as FB Platform
• 07/ FB announced its first acquisition, purchasing Parakey, Inc. from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt
• 08/ FB is featured in a Newsweek cover story by Steven Levy in the magazine’s annual college edition

 2007

• 08/ FB hires YouTube’s former CFO Gideon Yu
• 10/ AP reports Microsoft has bought a 1.6% share of the company for $240 million (valuing FB at about $15B)
• 11/ FB announces FB Ads; a marketing initiative which includes:
  •  a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their FB friends (FB Beacon);
  • the capability of businesses to host pages on FB for various brands, products and services (FB Pages)
  • a targeted ad serving program based on user and friend profile and activity data (FB Social Ads)
  • a service for providing businesses with advertisement analytic data including performance metrics (FB Insights).

Source: Wikipedia

On a personal level, the impact of Facebook has been profound. I have found friends from primary and secondary school, that I would likely have never seen again (in fact, one of such friends whose mother was my pediatrician, currently lives in Sweden! What are the odds I’d have ever run into him ever again?). Facebook has also provided numerous insights into the interrelationships among the people I know. The theme is recurrent: I discover that my secondary school classmate (in Lagos, Nigeria) is in fact the cousin of a Chicago acquaintance… or that a former neighbor is in fact the room mate of one of my buddy’s girlfriend—who is, by the way, the sister of another friend!

Of course, like everyone else, I have deep privacy concerns… do I really want my personal information (name, photos, e-mail address, up-to-the-minute statuses) so available? Do I really want the inter-relationships among my friends so clearly discernable? Are the benefits (finding old friends, gaining insights into interrelationships, keeping in touch, etc.) worth the risks (the biggest of which is related to privacy).

For now, I continue to be enamored of FB, yet leery of its potentials… I expect I will continue to enjoy FB (forging new friendships and relationships, rediscovering old friends, gaining insights into interrelationships), but will make an effort to mitigate potential risks by tightening my privacy options.

My biggest admiration for Facebook, through, rest with how extraordinarily innovative they’ve been (for example, their API offering turns out to be a game changer in the web app development space), how astonishingly responsive they’ve been to customer needs and yearnings, and how brutally on-point their execution of their business strategy has been.

Anyone with the slightest sliver of entrepreneurial aspirations better be taking notes.

Postscript: For whatever reason, here’s the Facebook that never came to be: ConnectU.

So, my last post here was to basically say that I was moving my blogging to my newly-launched bornAfrican.com blog. I have since blogged on that site, and am pretty darn proud of the strides we made in terms of number and quality of posts, as well as number of new bloggers. But, to be honest, I have learned a couple of things since I last expressed that resolution to move my blogging from here to there:

1. While the blog at bornAfrican.com is quite suited to serious editorials, I do not feel inclined to post entries of a personal nature on my bornAfrican.com blog. As bornAfrican.com is billed as a “convergence of Africana,” it wouldn’t appear to make much sense to rant about the aggravations of metropolitan life, for example. Neither would it be appropriate to wax lyrical about a love interest. The blogs at bornAfrican.com are serious business: in my case, impassioned harangues of the Nigerian status quo. I intend to continue to do this, with a view to paying more attention to the economics as much as to the politics within the Nigerian space particularly, and Africa, in general.
2. Running an initiative might not be as easy as it might initially seem. As you might have seen from that posting in which I declared the move to the bornAfrican.com blogs, bornAfrican.com promised numerous initiatives… from Music to Classifieds to an online Store, etc. For a number of reasons, only the blogs has made sufficient traction… the music component, through live, has not lived up to its billing. The goal is to continue to look for ways to get these offerings into production, and to bring the bornAfrican.com initiative, as a whole, to its potential.
3. Keep at it. That’s a lesson that’s not been lost on me in the whole process… The implicit message being that context and constraints change all the time… the challenge is figuring out when and how to modify the modus operandi in such a way as to ensure continuity…

In summary, I have resolved to return here to post more personal stuff; my blog at bornAfrican.com is clearly not an appropriate outlet for such entries. I will continue to post the more serious stuff—the ones that have implications for matters larger than you or me (at least from my perspective) to the bornAfrican.com blog, but the daily (relatively trivial) stuff go here.

Sidebar: 

One phenomenon that has (and continues to) at once awe, inspire, and amaze me? Facebook.

We’ll talk more about this and more, I’m sure, pretty soon.

Ciao.

postscript: let me use the opportunity to thank bayo, idiare, ejike, ade, tolu, seni, and “edward” for being bloggers at bornAfrican.com. Do you want to join the bornAfrican.com cadre of bloggers? Please accept my personal invitation.