Why do I heart Facebook?

Confession: I am one of Facebook’s 225 million or so active users and one of the 100m who actually logs on at least once a day.

Do you care to know why?:

(1) I have used Facebook as part of the communication strategy on quite a few projects with great success. I love the fact that you have access to demographic information to target your message. Some say it’s pricey, but what I’ve seen is higher conversion rates and ROI than with Adwords.

(2) Links on Facebook are responsible for 95% of my personal blog’s traffic. It makes sense if you think that 19% of hits to Huffington Post blog come from FB links, and that they are also the number one driver of traffic to the Perez Hilton gossip site.

(3) I agree with Hala Gorani from CNN: nobody emails these days! Email is turning into the new snail mail. 80% of my emails are work-related. I don’t need to send an email to my friends to catch up; they can learn what I am hallucinating about from my blog and what I am up to ... on Facebook! (that one works both ways, of course – the 'what are they up to', not the hallucinating part).

Facebook is getting more hits these days than Yahoo, and despite the unexpected rise of ‘rival’ Twitter in the last months, FB’s user numbers keep growing quickly (more than half of the users have signed up in the last year!)

Having said all of the above, I have one complaint: Why is 'Facebook' marked as a spelling mistake every time I type it on anything MS and on Blogger, when the word 'Google' is not?!

Archaeology in the 35th century

As part of a project I am working on, I recently did some research on a particular archaeological site in Cyprus known as the Saranta Kolones castle. The name, which is obviously Greek, means “40 columns” and it comes from the many granite columns that were found scattered around the ruins of what is believed to have been a 7th century fortress.

Nobody really knows exactly when Saranta Kolones was built or what for, but it became a UNESCO World Heritage site; I guess mainly because it is about 1400 years old.

So, that got me thinking...

How will archaeology reports of our times read in the year 3400? I can only guess it would be something like this:

“The Holecene Epoch complex of “2000 seats” is located in a vast plain and is believed to have been surrounded by a series of trading outlets where people use to exchange printed paper for goods. It takes its name from the many seats that were found on the site and which probably once formed part of this ancient place of worship.

The complex is believed to have been built at the end of the 20th century AD to perform some kind of ancient ritual. The building consists of a large structure divided in eight rooms which could accommodate a total of about 2000 seats. All the seats seem to have been facing towards one of the walls. No traces of images have been found on any of these very large walls that were about 6 meters tall x 15 meters wide; so it is speculated that the attendants used to worship The Wall itself during sessions that lasted about 2 hours each.

It seems that there was some kind of classification as to who could worship in which room and at what time of the day. Children were not allowed in some of the rooms at certain times and in some cases the sessions were attended mainly by males or females.

A reception area, common to all rooms, is believed to have been used to sort out the worshipers.

One privileged single person, probably a priest of some sort, could worship from a private room. This room was located at a very high level, opposite The Wall, and had a rather small hole through which the priest would either conduct the worshiping ritual or attend it in privacy.”

Now, try to imagine the future archaeological description of DisneyWorld!