Facebook more popular than football and porn

I know it's sad, but I really love stats and graphs...and have been having some fun tonight playing with the fabulous Google Trends.

Having mucked about with it a bit, I realised you can do comparison trends, and obviously after a glass of wine or two, I thought I'd see just how popular social networking sites really are, as everyone I meet now seems to have a presence on Facebook.

According to UK searches on Google, Facebook is now a more popular search item than football, holidays or porn! Here's proof...

In the US, Time magazine even agrees that Facebook is more popular than porn.

I'd love to see some stats on the level of usage of different available on Facebook, to more fully understand how people are actually using it, considering you can do anything from fling food at one another, to fighting vitual wars (which I know too well, being as I am, addicted to Warbook), to collaborating on group projects and sharing information. I'm sure someone somewhere will be starting a thesis on the use of Facebook but knowing what it is that has made Facebook so popular that as a search term, it's ranks more highly than porn and football will give us a real insight into how we might leverage online social networking for business advantage.

In the meantime, I'll just enjoy it for what it is, good fun, excellent for connecting with likeminded people and really very useful for keeping in touch with people I rarely see, even if it is just sending them virtual G&Ts.

Facebook - not as innocent as it seems

A month or so ago I received an innocuous invite from a friend to "join me on Facebook", so I did, innocently and without any understanding of the future impact of my action.

After wasting many hours trying to get a purple rabbit called Gerald to win his fight against various monsters, posting pictures of Sheffield flood carnage, ignoring people trying to turn me into a vampire, zombie, pirate etc, and flinging food and drinks and flowers at my friends, I've realised Facebook is just one big playground of mindless yet addictive applications. This rather sweet poem from David Bogner says it all really...

Facebook has gargantuan time-sucking powers, but what's worse, much worse, is that Facebook is now being used by employers to assess the potential suitability of job applicants. Mike Gotta points out that if information concerning protected characteristics (e.g., race, gender, or age) is disclosed and those being assessed by employers are not hired, they may find themselves on the wrong end of discrimination claims. David Lacey warns that employers might have grounds to demand ownership of their employees’ social networking information.

This is bad, as any prospective employer looking at my Facebook profile would think I was a mindless numpty with too much time on their hands and alot of mad friends who like to take pictures of people blowing rasberries (pretty good actually, check this one out...)

So consider this when you're in the middle of a virtual food fight - someone somewhere may be checking you out...and dismissing you as an idiot...