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11 December 2012

No Facebook - The Mayans were correct - the end of the world is nigh!

When Facebook was out of action last night for the shortest period of time (probably only 10-15 minutes at most) my wife didn't know what to do with herself. She quickly switched to Twitter and said to me, "No-one is tweeting about Facebook being down." Her face looked perplexed and then worried. I personally hate Facebook, always have, I class it as the biggest waste of time since answering silly questions on Yahoo answers like, "Can I get pregnant from holding hands?"

Back to my wife's face, she was really worried after two minutes she still didn't see any tweets about the Facebook problem that her and maybe many others were experiencing. It was only after a minute or two later she saw some tweets and realised that Facebook was having some connection problems. I had told her to connect via a proxy server for a trial of whether it was just a Turkish problem.

In Turkey because the Internet is heavily blocked in many places and with many sites that other users worldwide can use and browse without problems then I believe that this creates extra traffic. If you send some bits 1's and 0's down a set of data cables and you are blocking this data and sending messages back to users and then those users are searching again and again for other ways to get around the blockages or other alternatives simply because they cannot find the information they need then this could in theory increase the traffic. Rather than staying on a static page for a minute or so and reading or viewing the content you are constantly searching. That's my thought on it anyway!

So, my wife was in a state of disarray, just recently since managing to set-up Twitter and Facebook on her mobile phone she has become addicted to checking messages and showing me stupid videos of extremely boring music or boring people doing boring things. I have no interest in these sites nor the videos shared on them and I only see these sites of use to someone trying to increase their Google rankings for their business  website or for meeting some old school friend or work colleague that you hoped at the age of 14/19, etc years of age you would never ever see again.

I forget when I signed up to this service but it was in the early days and I thought what is all the fuss about. I was on it for one day and I got a friend request from a person that was my school enemy and I thought, "Wow! This thing is a game changer! It is promoting world peace!" The second friend request I got was from an old girlfriend and I remembered that girlfriend for the fact that she was highly crazy and highly jealous for no apparent reason. Talking to a shop assistant passing my goods through a supermarket scanning machine was enough for her laser guided eyes to start burning holes in the back of my head and after we left the store the atomic cloud could be seen for miles. Not good times and why would I want to remember this and I distinctly remember how difficult it was to close the account at the time. Like signing up with Satan, once you are in, you are in (no getting out).

It was now 2 o'clock in the morning and my wife had to wake up at 6 a.m. and I said, "Go to bed and it will be back online tomorrow, I'm sure." She couldn't stop herself when she received a tweet that it was back on, she had to log in and check the sent posts straight away. A late night, a late wake-up in the morning and late for work as well. Facebook has not only become a social tool but it has become the reason you are late for work, the reason you are too tired to make love, the reason you are talking with enemies that you don't want to talk to any more and not talking to your real friends anymore. When Facebook went off, I saw a lost soul who couldn't find her way, a woman who is more than able to control her life but seemingly unable to control anything if Facebook doesn't work. If the Mayan predictions are true, one solar flair later and millions, maybe billions of Facebook users may well think that their world has ended. No electricity, no social tools - they lost all their social tools during the Facebook initiation. When the world goes 'no electric', then God help us all.




Happy New Year!

1 comments:

Nomad said...

I remember one time there was a real switcheroo to the usual story. There was some kind of major blackout in the Aegean region (I think it had something to do with a power station blowing up or something like that) and all of Izmir was plunged into darkness.
Because at that time I was using a modem that drew power off my laptop, I was able to get online. From there, I had a link to all of the live cams in Izmir which told me how extensive the blackout actually was.
Being so savvy gave me a big head for a week or two until the next computer problem arose.