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, bornAfrican.com has finally gotten off the ground!

bornAfrican (http://www.bornafrican.com) is an online community for Africans, and is billed “the convergence of Africana.”

I encourage you to join and be a part of the bornAfrican community… share your African (and human) experience, converse with old friends and meet new ones … rant, rave, pontificate … take advantage of current and coming offerings … spread the word by telling your friends about bornAfrican … help to make small (or earth-shattering, if you like) improvements to bornAfrican, over time…

So, I will now blog at http://www.bornafrican.com/blog/author/coyibo/. (Or, just visit bornafrican.com, and click on the Blogs navigation tab).

Catch you on the rebound—at bornAfrican.

C. E. Oyibo, Over and Out.
bornAfrican.com

We’ve all received that e-mail, right? The one that urges us to “forward this to 20 people” in return for anything from “a laptop from Dell” to “a miracle in 7 days” to an outright “surprise right after you click ‘Send’”. Who hasn’t seen the one that says Bill Gates will send you a check for $1 for every single person you forward the message to?

I just received one such e-mail today, and couldn’t help but shake my head at the gullibility and outright folly of the universe. The e-mail appeared to have traversed a good portion of the Internet, for it appeared to have been forwarded many a time. Scrolling through the multitude of e-mail headers (To, From, CC, etc.), revealing the e-mail’s traversal path, to the bottom of the message, brought me upon:

Hi everyone,

The Ericsson Company is distributing free computer Lap-tops in an attempt to match Nokia that has already done so.  Ericsson hopes to increase its popularity this way. For this reason, they are giving away the new WAP laptops. All you need to do to qualify is to send this mail to 8 people you know. Within 2 weeks, you will receive EricssonT18. But if you can send it to 20 people or more, you will receive Ericsson  R320.

Make sure to send a copy to : anna.swelung@ericsson.com

The scheme here should be fairly obvious: you send this to 8 people, cc’ing Ms. “Anna Swelung” at “Ericsson.com”. Depending on how gullible your 8 friends are (let’s say that an arbitrary 50% of them are in fact gullible and forward the message to 8 of their own friends), Ms. Swelung now has your e-mail address, plus the 8 e-mail addresses you forwarded to her (via cc), plus the 8 e-mail addresses that 4 of your recipients sent to her… (and this doesn’t even count the e-mail addresses of the folks upstream to you; i.e., the folks that sent you the message in the first place).

Now, let’s say you and your friends are really, really gullible, and decide to up the ante by forwarding the e-mail to not 8, but 20 of your buddies… Think about how quickly (read: exponential growth) Ms. Swelung’s e-mail box will fill-up with the e-mail addresses of folks thirsty for a free laptop computer… Ah, thousands, if not millions of e-mail addresses, harvested, and ready to be spammed with Viagra, Cialis, and HornyAsianVixens.com come-ons.

Out of curiously, I copied ericsson.com from the contact’s e-mail address, and pasted it into my browser’s address window (which resolved it to www.ericsson.com). The site I came to appeared to have no more than a slightly subliminal connection to the telephone company at www.sonyericsson.com.

A couple thoughts:

1. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
2. By extention, if it doesn’t make sense, it probably, well, doesn’t. (A company gives away its high-cost/high-margin product, on a large (Internet-wide) scale—to “increase its popularity” and match its competition? How sustainable is that?!)
3. And, finally, there is no such thing as a free lunch; in fact, there is no such thing as ‘Free’. Everything has a price.

I really do hope that those little programs that scour the Internet in search of e-mail addresses, ALL grab Anna Swelung’s e-mail address from this page, and that they all collectively spam her to no end. That would give her a taste of her own medicine.

Postscript:

The clincher: neither Ericsson T18 nor Ericsson  R320 (pictured) are laptop computers; both are cellular phones.

And, both are discontinued models.