Amazing Facebook Facts

markzuckerbergEven though my college-age kids just can’t stomach the fact that I’m on Facebook, I think I’ll be there forever. Or at least for the foreseeable future. So there.

Why? It seriously is the most intuitive digital application I’ve ever been on. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t find myself marveling over the fact that Mark Zuckerberg, then a Harvard college student from my neck of the woods, came up with this thing.

Brian Solis, who maintains one of my favorite blogs, PR 2.0, recently put together a list, Everything You Never Knew About Facebook, that just vindicates me in my Facebook Fascination. It’s a list of 20 factoids that are rather mind-blowing, especially when you consider that the popular application didn’t exist until it was incorporated in 2004.

Here’s a sample from the Solis list:

Facebook has more than 250 million users

120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day

People 35 years old and older comprise the fastest growing demographic

More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day worldwide

30 million users update their statuses at least once each day

1 billion (!) photos and 10 million videos are uploaded to the social network each month

2.5 million events are created each month

45 million active user groups exist on Facebook

About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States

Every month, more than 70% of users engage with applications developed for the Facebook platform

More than 350,000 active applications are currently available on the Facebook Platform

15,000, and counting, websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its launch in December 2008

30 million users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices

There’s a reason my kids love Facebook. Ditto for their Mom.

OneDayU: For Lifelong Learners

I love to learn new stuff as an adult, most likely due to a misspent youth. As an undergraduate college student, I knew where the pool tables were located. Let’s just leave it at that.

If you’re like me, trying to make up for lost time, or if you just love to learn new things, check out OneDayU, an organization (or company) that’s offering one-day workshops and seminars on a variety of topics.

Here’s what they say:

We’ve gathered the country’s brightest professors from the world’s finest universities to create the most stimulating day of college available anywhere. Our class lineup lets you partake in the latest thinking on world affairs, science, politics, history, art, literature, and more—and you don’t need to spend $45,000 an academic year to enjoy it! At One Day University there are no entrance exams, no SATs to ace, and no stress. It’s just live classes taught by the most sought-after professors from America’s most prestigious schools.

Here’s a sampling of what they offer:

– On May 17, a one-day class with Will Shortz (he of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle), who will lead a two-hour live and interactive discussion in Manhattan, explaining how he creates his famous New York Times crossword puzzles, and highlighting some of the special “insider” tricks and tips you can use to solve the hard ones.

– On May 9, a series of professors will do a day-long event that will include Kenneth Miller of Brown University on “Science: God vs. Darwin — America’s Continuing Problem with Evolution,Richard Pious of Barnard/Columbia University on “History: Lincoln’s Constitutional Dictatorship & Lessons for Today, Paul Bracken of Yale University on “Foreign Affairs: The Global Economic Crisis — the U.S. in a Volatile World, and Sherwin Nuland of Yale, on “The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci.”

Although those two events happen to be taking place near me, in New York City, OneDayU holds sessions in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other locations.

Check out the website and sign up for lifelong learning.

More on Social Media, Colleges and Universities

Many thanks to Heather Mansfield of Diosa Communications for promoting my post, “Why Schools Need to Get on the Social Media Bandwagon,” on her website. You can find my post here and at PROpenMic, one of my favorite Ning social networking sites. Speaking of Ms. Mansfield, she’s a web 2.0 consultant and expert with a great site that, among other things, lists good reads on the topic of using Web 2.0 tools in education. On her higher education page, she lists Web 2.0 Articles, Blogs, and Resources for Higher Education.
She also highly recommends the use of MySpace by colleges and universities, since they’re listed there on MySpaceSchools anyway. Here are two great links she sent along:
Her MySpace Portal
Her FaceBook page
Let’s see if her hard work pays off and if colleges and universities eventually get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon.

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You Need to Go to Unigo

The New York Times recently featured a piece about Unigo and the 20-something kid who dreamed up the idea, Jordan Goldman. I immediately checked out the site, and initially had trouble getting on. It might have sensed that at my age, I had no business being on a website created and maintained by college students.

But I tried again later, and it let me in. I have two college students, for crying out loud. And a $67,000-a-year tuition payment. I deserve a break today.

What I saw in Unigo was fun and promising, a classic example of Web 2.0 — user-generated content — about to take off from the crowded Internet runway but with good genes and youthful enthusiasm bearing it aloft.

Goldman, a graduate of Wesleyan University, spent a couple of years after graduation in Europe, then returned to New York City to develop his business plan and go begging for investors. His plan worked, and today he runs an office of about 25 young people who manage Unigo and a crew of intern correspondents spread out over the nation’s colleges and reporting back in with videos, photos and updates.

The site thrives on student-written critiques of their own colleges, and already would appear to be one step ahead of those on-paper college guides we all used in the past. Here’s what Goldman says in the Times piece about his site:

“My whole family chipped in for me to go to college,” he said. “They were saving from when I was 2 or 3 years old. That the best resource for a four-year, $200,000 decision are these books — with no photos, no videos, no interactivity, only three to five pages per school on average, fully updated usually once every several years — just doesn’t make the grade. This is the most important decision people that age have ever made, and the information is just not there.”

Here’s how it works:

Each Unigo editor has a list of 10 colleges (including, always, his or her own alma mater) to oversee; their most important task may be finding an unpaid intern on each campus willing to act as a liaison and an occasional reality-checker for Unigo’s efforts. The real masterstroke, though, was the purchase of a hundred Flip video cameras, which were delivered to the on-campus interns themselves with a minimum of instructions. The results are not only vivid in a way no guidebook can match but also, in the way of the generation that produced them, often guilelessly intimate.

The point is to provide students, and presumably their parents, with an unvarnished look at real life at the colleges they’re considering — something the colleges themselves are not good at providing. Who can blame them? As a parent who drove her kids to nearly every college on the East Coast, only to find that the tours were a bit too rah-rah superficial, I’d rather check out a school on a site like Unigo before packing up the van and heading out who-knows-where. Even if that means I might be watching someone talk online about the campus suicides or the black-white divide that still exists. I’d much rather get to the truth about a place before my kids get there, rather than after they’ve moved in.

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