The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Posted: 03 Feb 2014 10:25 PM PST Facebook currently boasts 1.23 billion monthly active users, 60% of whom visit daily – that's actually a 16% jump year-on-year and, more importantly, it is making serious money. Its profits for 2013 were $1.5 billion (RM5.02 billion). But as well as attracting a user base equal to a quarter of the world's population (and growing), over the past decade Facebook has managed to ingrain itself in popular culture and modern language in a way that no other tech company, with the notable exception of Google, had before managed. To 'friend' and to 'unfriend' are now verbs, as is to 'unlike', and to 'poke' now means to tell someone else you exist. However, some of the doomsayers preaching Facebook's demise do have a point. Facebook's launch was pre-mobile internet. Facebook predates YouTube, Twitter, the iPhone, the Android operating system, tablets and Google Glass. And new social sites such as Pinterest or Tumblr or Instagram that have sprung up in its wake have been focused on delivering one element of what Facebook was already offering, and usually offering it optimised for mobile devices. One of the reasons Snapchat has overtaken Facebook as a site for sharing photos (350 million a day and counting) is because it enables its users to do so privately on a network where they're not 'friends' with their parents. However, one of the most startling statistics when Facebook announced its quarterly results in January was its number of mobile users – 945 million active monthly users and growing, fast. The key to Facebook's survival and its fight to remain socially relevant is to not simply focus on mobile, but to break down the many features it offers – sharing images, messaging, checking in, sharing stories, etc, into separate, mobile apps, while the website remains an umbrella destination – and that is exactly what Facebook is doing. To celebrate its 10th birthday it launched Paper, a news curation and sharing app that will give Flipboard a real run for its money and that went live on February 3 in the US. It is one of many apps that are set to come over the next three years. "Connecting everyone means giving the power to share different kinds of content with different groups of people," said Mark Zuckerberg of the decision to focus on mobile during his conference call. "This is something we focused on by launching separate mobile apps beyond the main Facebook app – Messenger and Instagram are great examples of this." And by different groups of people he is referring to the fact that the younger generation are being turned off by Facebook because it is full of their extended family – uncles, aunts and parents. But then again, of course it is: today's parents were last decade's early-adopter teens and young adults. Zuckerberg knows this better than anyone and understands that the key to making Facebook truly global is to fragment it and package it up for different types and ages of consumers. As he explained during the recent earnings call: "If you think about the overall space of sharing and communication, there's not just one thing that people are doing. People want to have the ability to share any kind of content with any audience. There are going to be a lot of different apps that exist, and Facebook has always had the mission of helping people share any kind of content with any audience, but historically we've done that through a single app." And, when Facebook or its app is second best to another service, pull out the checkbook. Just like it did with Instagram and attempted to do with Snapchat. But whatever the future holds, one thing's pretty certain: that it will be a future in which Facebook continues to exist. After all only one third of the world's adult population has internet access. "We're looking forward to our next decade and to helping connect the rest of the world... It's been an amazing journey so far but what's ahead is even more exciting," said Zuckerberg. Facebook by the numbers |
| Crumbling Athens housing complex comes to life in crisis Posted: 03 Feb 2014 07:36 PM PST As Greece's six-year economic slump has increased the number of homeless to 20,000 in Athens alone, non-governmental organisations estimate, the "Prosfygika" complex has become a haven for squatters and drug addicts as well as immigrants from Iran and elsewhere trying to cross into northern Europe through Greece's porous borders. Flat-roofed and boxy, typical of the German Bauhaus school of design, the complex of eight housing blocks was considered architecturally ahead of its time when it was built in the 1930s to house some of the 1.5 million Greeks who were displaced by a 1923 population exchange with Turkey after World War 1. Today, their descendants are struggling to cope with their new neighbours, reflecting broader social tensions in Greece, especially between locals and immigrants that have intensified during recent years of economic hardship that forced Greece to require two international bailouts. "Here, people come and go," said 76-year-old pensioner Yannis Chiotakis, one of about 30 remaining descendants of the blocks' original inhabitants, gesturing to a group of drug addicts roaming the streets. "But I can't tolerate this. I pay for electricity, for water, for all these taxes and next door there's someone who's living for free?" he said, referring to squatters. The complex is mostly state owned and its crumbling exterior has attracted critics who say the buildings do not belong on one of Athens' busiest streets, between the capital's police headquarters and the top court. But a 2008 decision declaring them a protected site means they cannot be torn down. Preparing food from a soup kitchen over a donated stove in her cramped one-bedroom apartment, Emine Kilic, a Turkish mother of 10, said the family began squatting in Prosfygika two years ago when her husband lost his job as a construction worker. "We had no choice. This is home now," she said. A few buildings down, a Greek couple driven from their Athens home because they could not afford rent during the recession are also squatting. Nearby, two Iranian migrants play cards and sip tea, their cigarette smoke filling the room they share with about a dozen other Iranians, all waiting to leave Greece for north European countries such as Norway, where they hope to find work. In 2001, the state bought all but 51 apartments in the complex whose owners refused to sell. But various renovation plans fell through over the years, including tearing down the complex to build a park or converting it into guest houses for a cancer hospital. One woman who was born and has lived her entire life in the complex recalls years of fights to save it from being torn down until Greece's top administrative court finally declared it protected property in 2008. "There were rallies, hunger strikes, sit-ins," said 76-year-old Chrysoula Charizanou, a former seamstress who raised her three children in a one-bedroom apartment here. Development plans Charizanou's parents used up their life savings to buy the tiny apartment and she laments that the complex has been left to ruin by a cash-strapped state which has dithered over what to do with it. Without central heating, she spends evenings in thick sweaters huddled over a tiny wood-stove heater in her apartment, the outside walls of which bear shell marks from when the complex was caught in crossfire during Greece's civil war in the 1940s. Outside, the wide, dusty dirt roads between each block, one of the few open spaces in central Athens, are jammed with parked cars and often flood with sewage from broken pipes. "My kids tell me: 'Leave, come stay with us'. But I love this place," Charizanou said, flicking through piles of black-and-white photographs from the 1960s, when neighbours held dance parties on the roof. "I was born here and I will die here. Maybe by then something will change." Charizanou and the remaining residents who own apartments in the complex have formed a committee and often press the local authorities to kick out the squatters and remove the graffiti that covers the outside of all the buildings. But they have been told there is no money to spare. An official at the state company which owns most of the property said only that a plan to develop the property would be finalised this year. That is creating uncertainty for the long-time residents who were born and grew up here and are determined to stay on living in Prosfygika no matter what. Pulling up his trousers to show a scar from a bullet wound suffered as a child during the civil war, Chiotakis, the pensioner, said he had even convinced his daughter to rent the flat next door. "I've no intention of going anywhere," he said. – Reuters, February 4, 2014. |
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