Facebook turns 10

This week Facebook turned 10. Managing to survive a whole decade! From starting out in Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room with a couple of mates to having it's own film and over 1 billion users.

Image from Dotmailer

I was a bit late on the bandwagon, joining in 2009, about 5 years after it came to the UK but I didn't think I was really missing out on anything. I just used Bebo and MSN to talk to people (Wow, that's taking it back, isn't it?!) Suddenly Facebook became this new thing everyone was getting, so I joined.

I remember setting up my profile with a friend, sorting out all my likes and dislikes then adding photos of all of us at school (around this time I was about 12/13). Then adding everyone from my year at school and any other friends and family. Soon, mine and others walls became filled with messages and those cringey statuses (mine was complaining that my then boyfriend was mocking me!), then they finally added Chat. If you hadn't already guessed, Bebo was put swiftly to the side and MSN became a thing of the 1990s.

Perhaps the only times when Facebook is in the news is at special dates like this or when it's being criticised. Namely, a massive debate is over how much private information of users is made available to the rest of the world. Court cases have cost millions in these kind of Facebook matters over privacy but I think it's up to the user what they put out there. Of course, Facebook using your images or information as part of something else is not the users fault, but if you put your mobile number and address on your public profile page, you're not making it very secure in the future.

All the different features, Poke, Like, Comment and Chat, have created an interactivity that hadn't really existed on such wide scale terms.Connection is probably the key word you'd associate with Facebook. It's connected people from around the world, family, friends and partners. I still have friends in Texas and New Jersey who I met in 2008/9 on Facebook, enabling us to keep in contact and up to date with each other.

Who knows where Facebook will be in 10 years time? By that point I'll be 28 (God that sounds old!) and my account will probably still exist. And by that point I'll be surrounded by cats with enough chocolate digestives to survive for another 10 years.

What do you think of Facebook? Is it still cool or old and boring now?

Rhiannon xx