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.

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

On my taxicab ride from O’Hare today, the driver no sooner asked for my destination and bawled fluent Yoruba over his cell phone than inserted a Fela CD into the vehicle’s CD player.

While I have heard Fela’s indictment of Obasanjo, Nigeria’s two-time president, for killing (or at least having to do with the killing of) his mother during Obasanjo’s first presidency in the 70s, I (and I suspect many Nigerians in their characteristic complacency) have not really, and I mean truly, fully absorbed the import of Fela’s charge.

Perhaps I was roused by Fela’s lamentations of the murder of his mother by the fact that I only just finished reading Wole Soyinka’s childhood autobiography, Ake—in which he recounts Mrs. Kuti’s valiant headship of a women’s liberation movement in colonial (i.e., pre-independence) Western Nigeria, that rendered the Alake, the King of Egbaland, the white District Officer, and the at once feared and revered Ogboni, all summarily impotent.

Did Obasanjo kill this woman of whom Soyinka wrote? The one that dared lambaste (to my utter joy) the insolent white colonial D. O. with the riposte,

You may have been born, but you were not bred. Would you talk to your mother like that?

The one that inspired the march on, and siege of, the Aafin, the palace of the Alake? Did dark-hearted, cowards of men, on orders of President Obasanjo and his vice Yar’Adua, really throw Fela’s mother off a balcony onto her death?

Countries and cities vie to host global events like the Olympics, the World Cup, the Miss World pageant, etc., in hopes that the literal convergence of the world onto that geographic space will translate into some real contribution to the local economy, etc., etc.

It leaves one really, truly aghast then, when the argument purportedly advanced by “the spokesman for the Nigeria[n] Olympic Committee (NOC)” to support his country’s bid for hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014 is the need to:

… celebrate the centenary of the unification of its northern and southern protectorate[s].

This refers, but of course, to the British “amalgamation” of northern and southern Nigeria in 1914. BUT… What exactly are we celebrating? The invasion, violation, and exploitation of the peoples inhabiting the Nigerian space circa 1914? Or the arbitrary drawing and re-drawing of geo-political maps and interventions into those peoples’ collective fortunes?

What an absolute goon.

According to BBC News, Nigerian Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential contender, Umaru Yar’Adua (pictured) was flown to Germany last week after he collapsed at a campaign rally.

In other words, the man collapsed out of I’ll bet, no more than mere exhaustion, and had to be rushed—not down the street, or to the next town, or to a neighbouring country—but half way across the world, to an entirely different continent, to be attended to. What does this say about the state of Medicine (amongst a host of other things) in Nigeria? Or, does this reflect the Nigerian perception of local products and services relative to foreign ones? Perhaps it’s a combination of both and many other factors?

How much of an indictment is this of the Nigerian leadership?

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.

On Creationism

I believe there is a Creator. Or, to put it more accurately, I’d like to believe there is a Creator.

But believing is not the same thing as knowing—at least, not in the epistemological sense. My ‘belief’ is different from what I consider ‘knowledge,’ in that it is based on an imperative not too dissimilar from ‘faith,’ rather than empirical evidence, discernible by the senses or through deduction.

I believe there is a Creator; I just do not know that there is one.

Why I do believe that there is a Creator?

It appears highly unlikely to me that the universe, in all its complexity, began spontaneously and without cause, out of nothing. The sheer diversity and organization of things would appear to require the concerted action of a creator. In order words, I believe it is more likely than not that a universe as complex ours resulted from some sort of higher intelligence.

Also—and I am convinced many people share this sentiment—my belief in a Creator is driven by a desire, nay need, for there to be something bigger than me… for there to be something that transcends my mortality. Believing in a Creator satisfies that need.

 (True, true, these two ‘arguments’ do not offer deductively valid support for the belief in a Creator, either. Nonetheless, I think that the first one at least, is strong enough to support that belief.)

Why I do not know there is a Creator?

I cannot claim to know that a Creator exists because I have not seen any empirical, fool-proof evidence for His (or Her) existence.

What is your own belief based on?

Do you KNOW that a Creator exists? What is this ‘knowledge’ based on? If you have a deductively valid (i.e. 100% fool-proof) argument for the existence of a Creator, do post a comment. Note though that anecdotal “evidence” do not count.

Finally, without convincing empirical evidence, I categorically refuse to believe in:

voodoo · juju · jazz · deities · shamans · shamanism · astral travel · ouija boards · reincarnation · sublimation · demons · demonism · demonic possession · Satan · Satanism · conspiracy theories · spiritualism · charms · talismans · cults · occultism · fraternities · confraternities · angels · archangels · demonic suppression · feng shui · organized religion · psychics · magicians · magic · witches · wizards · witchcraft · wizardry · curses · spells · incantations · heaven · hell · purgatory · the sixth sense · extra sensory perception · past lives · aliens · unidentified flying objects · etc.

Read the Poem, Abiku, by Charles O.

Background

To the uninitiated, Abiku can be a rather daunting piece. This is so because an understanding of the meaning and implications of the Abiku concept is necessary for a proper understanding of the poem.

If the belief in the supernatural is all-pervasive in traditional African culture, then the belief in the inimical and diabolic variant is even more insidiously ingrained in that tradition. Abiku (figuratively “born to die”) in Yoruba lore refers to one such malevolent spirit who appropriates and insinuates a woman’s womb to be born and re-born, for the singular purpose of unleashing recurring tumult on such a woman. The woman, then, conceives, carries the pregnancy to term, delivers, only for the child, Abiku, to die within the first few years of its birth.

In some cases though, the spirit-baby pities her mother and decides to stay permanently.

The poem Abiku explores the travails of a woman who has birthed several Abiku. Each conception brought her an unnerving admixture of “elation and despair”. Indeed, she inhabited, perpetually, the twilight between exaltation and grief: in one year she would conceive, in another, deliver, and in a few more yet, mourn the death of the child. The poem captures a moment when our protagonist, pregnant again, sits on her windowsill and gazes at the night sky. Crying silently, she prays the gods to have mercy on her, and have Abiku stay this time. As though in assurance of a new resolution, the child stirs within.

Imagery & Symbolism

“Death” and “rebirth,” “emergence” and “spiral … into abyssal depths,” “elation” and “despair,” “arrivals” and “departures,” are imageries at odds with each other. We sense antagonistic forces—life and death, emergence and downward spiral, et cetera—engaged in tense battles, as though for their very own continuity.

The “accentuation” of the protagonist’s belly by the night’s full moon provides another striking imagery. For one, both are round; for another, both are, literally, full. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, just as the full moon heralds the dawning of a new day, the woman’s full belly portends the impending arrival of a new being.

Message

Undoubtedly, there are as many interpretations of a poem as there are readers of it. One of the messages I take away from the poem though is that, just as the protagonist, who had suffered repeatedly at Abiku’s hands, clung obstinately to the hopes of having a child that would survive past infancy, we all must remain steadfast to our higher aspirations in spite of (or, even, because of) the odds. We must, indeed, never resign ourselves to the accident of chance, or worse, fate.

Even in the face of forces seemingly outside of her control, our protagonist expressed hope for an eventual breakthrough (“maybe she’ll stay”) this time.

*

Rewritten from the original piece of May 9, 2002.