When banned-in-China Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited last month, accompanied by long time girlfriend Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American woman from Boston who went to Harvard wtih him back in the good old days, there were two signs that caught his attention as he toured Beijing.
One banner read, in English, "Warm welcome to China to the founder of the website 404 Not Found". The other banner read "Warm Welcome to Mr. Part of Your Search Results Cannot be Displayed".
Kidding. Actually, Zuckerberg had a good time in China and is now safely back at Facebook headquarters gently scratching his head and wondering what to make of it all. It sure is a big country, and he knows that now. It sure has a lot of people, and he knows that now, too. And damn, the Beijing winters are even colder than Boston and New York. Lessons learned by a peripatetic internet visionary on his way to world domination.
Kidding again. Zuckerberg met with a host of China's top technology leaders in Beijing, fuelling massive media speculation that Facebook has its eyes on entering a market where it is blocked by Chinese Communist Party censors.
Seems China is afraid of Facebook, but Facebook's not afraid of China.
Will he go in? Will Beijing extend an invite? Not in 2011 and probably not until China opens up enough to be called something like a full-fledged democracy. So don't expect any Facebook members in China this century.
Taiwan, "the other China", is another story. With millions of Facebook members in Taipei, fuelled by the complex Chinese writing characters that Taiwan still uses - in marked juxtaposition to the simplified characters mandated by the communist mandarins in China,
'Farmville'' and status updates are part of daily life in the democratic island nation just off the coast of China. But Taiwan has just 23 million people and China has 1.3 billion people, so Zuckerberg is, naturally, how shall we say, interested in that part of the Chinese-speaking world.
Do the math: China has 420 million internet users, more than any other nation on Earth. Do more math: Chinese social-networking sites have 176 million users and the number is going up every day.
More math: Facebook is available in 66 languages worldwide, and 77 percent of its more than 555 million active users are outside Obama's America.
With Facebook being terminally blocked inside China, and with communist authorities never saying exactly why, Zuckerberg wants to know what's cookin'. So he's lookin'. Stay glued to your status updates.
To tell the truth: Most FB accounts have just 120 'friends',
Just as Amazon likes to inflate it's bestseller rankings in order to hype
its online presence and global glamour, So too does Facebook inflate
its so-called "membership" stats. When TIME magazine honored CEO Mark
Zuckerberg with its "[Geek] Person of the Year" cover story -- an
annual sales and marketing
gimmick on TIME's own part -- Richard Stengel, the magazine's hype guru, told
readers that Zuckerberg was chosen "for connecting more than half a
billion people
and mappingt the social relations among them."
Excuse me, Richard, but most Facebook accounts have at most around 120
"friends", and
that's a far cry from half a billion. Where does this 500 million
figure come from? I have a FB
account, and I have around 120 friends, and I am not a ''member'' of
Facebook but merely
someone who signed up for a free account. I do not belong to Facebook
as a membership
organization any more than I belong to Google for having signed up for
its free gmail email service
And furthermore, Richard Stengel, Facebook is not a
500-mllion-member-strong social networking site. Most FB account
holders interact with at most 10-15 other FB account holders on any
given day. Where does this half a billion stat come from? It's hype,
it's marketing, it's bullocks.
Let's get real. Facebook is a phenomenon, it rocks. But it is not a
club of 500,000 people who all
interact and network with each other. It's just another platform on an
internet comprised of thousands of platforms, and while FB has won the
lottery for now, it might not even be around in 10 years.
All brought to you courtesy of American Zionists and their repressed economic slaves, so-called American 'middle class'.
Facebook's real motto: Helping Dictators Repress Proles Daily Since 2004.