The amusing TV commercial of Bayantel featuring an age-old woman dubbed as “Lola Techie”, who has been muttering the word “like” for what seemed like a gazillionth time whenever she finds pleasure in baking cookies, trimming her plants and, of course, literally liking her friends’ posts on Facebook (even when she’s asleep, she still dreams of the letters L-I-K-E), filled me with awe and got me pondering about the massive effects of the Internet and social networks in our daily lives. If you’d ask me if I could live without Facebook, I would unhesitatingly give an affirmative answer but that question is way too hypothetical. Besides, Google+ has been lurking around the corner for some time and Friendster has been wriggling back from extinction. I’d eventually concede; otherwise, I'd be left out of the trend.
I started using Facebook in 2009 to help market the company and a particular software. My sister and my cousin had already been using Facebook before I did and not many of my friends had an online presence; thus, I wasn’t very much fascinated when I knew Facebook exists. Although I had a Friendster account before, I wasn’t fond of virtual socialization and I only got interested with Friendster because I wanted to learn HTML and CSS by customizing my profile page.
When I began using Facebook, there are many things I saw that changed my views about social networks. Aside from posting your own updates, Facebook lets you “like” a friend’s post or comment on it and notifications happen in real time, in contrast to Friendster’s static testimonials that require page refresh. The “like” button is, I believe, the most remarkable feature of Facebook, not to mention the quite forgotten “poke” button which I’m still inclined to use. The “like” button has become so ubiquitous that some other websites have included a “like” link on their pages and so popular that many have included the word in their expression just as Lola goes on saying “Like Like Like”.
Other features that made Facebook different from other social networks are its wide range of games and applications, instant messaging or chat, fan pages, notes, photo albums, neat-looking interface, among others. Later on, with the burgeoning number of Facebook users, I got to connect with more people I know - classmates, teachers, acquaintances, both old and recent - and receive updates and news from organizations, celebrities, technology and stuffs that interest me most. I realized the purpose of a social network is all about sharing a piece of yourself and other certain things that aren’t exactly significant. These things could be personal opinions, ramblings, newsbits, gossips, swearings, cliches or anything under the sun. The downside is that some people have a tendency to reveal private information to strangers, which could endanger their lives. Some people, in fact, have been murdered or molested by Facebook chatmates. Some have put the blame on the technology but, hey, who have thought about getting killed when writing the spaghetti codes of the chatbox? (Snort) Our fate still lies in our choices.
So, how well do you like the “like” button? I hope you do because at the end of this post is a “like” button. I won’t ask you to click on it but I’m willing to teach you a simple trick if you wanted to add this pretty little embellishment. A snippet of code, which you can insert in the HTML body of your post, can be found below; just replace the href attribute or the string in boldface with the link to your blog post. Enjoy liking!
No comments:
Post a Comment