Facebook is slowly ruling our digital lives

Facebook has changed the way we do things both online and even offline.

No other site has a much bigger reach as Facebook in the Philippines. With over 40 million Filipinos that access the internet on a regular basis, at least 90 percent of those have a Facebook account. That’s one of the biggest personal databases outside of government control, which is why it is the most preferred marketing platform by so many brands.

Facebook has changed the way we do things both online and even offline. As one of the biggest public repositories of personal information, Facebook lures practically everybody to do just about anything on its network.

• People volunteer a lot of their personal information on Facebook. Birthday, location, school, work, interests, relationships, associations, contact information, and many more detailed information shared in their FB wall.

• Many sites rely on Facebook to sign up and manage users for them. Want to register to a new forum, open a new photo sharing account, post a comment on a news portal, or log-in to an old site where you forgot your username and password – Facebook will do all of that for you. FB basically controls access to most other sites and apps you use on a daily basis.

• FB is the new email and SMS. Since people spend more time on Facebook, it has also become the default messaging platform between friends, relatives and co-workers. Nobody says “Hi! How are you? It’s been a while!” over email nowadays as everyone is just a poke away on FB. Also gone are the mailing lists as they have been replaced by private FB Groups.

•  More and more employers are using Facebook to do background investigation of new and prospective hires. The FB Wall has become a reflection of one’s personality, interest and inclination. A lot of people have been successfully hired or accidentally fired because of what they say or share on Facebook.

•  Facebook is the new portal, the new personal homepage and the new online journal. People get their news on FB as friends share what’s trending and what issues are hot. While others use their FB account to market their home business and sideline, many more are using it as their personal online journals.

• Public personalities and brands use Facebook as a yardstick for popularity. Some would even go as far as beg or buy for more Facebook fans.

• Many people unknowingly use Facebook for archiving photos. It serves as a convenient photo album to share with friends and relatives. The danger is that once you lose your FB account, you’ll also lose all those years of memories.

• The Like and Share buttons are virtually everywhere. All the big news and content-related sites have those widgets to easily share their content on the largest social networking site in the world.

To the common internet user, Facebook has become the more familiar brand beating giants and old-timers like Yahoo and Google.  No other site has this much reach and influence on our daily lives. There’s practically no escape to the depth and breadth of Facebook’s creeping digital empire.

Facebook is even getting a lot of support from local telcos. Globe started introducing Free Facebook to all their subscribers over a year ago. Likewise, Smart has partnered with Internet.org to offer, among others, free Facebook to all Talk N Text subscribers. That means practically everyone who has  a smartphone can access Facebook for free anywhere in the Philippines.