2 Billion users visit Facebook every month. Thats around 30 percent of the total world population. Just take a moment to let this thought settle in. Want to know something more impressive? According to Internet Usage & Social Media Statistics, at the time of writing this article, the total number of internet users in the world is around 3.7 Billion. So, around 60 percent of the total internet users on this planet is using Facebook. Every month. You can pick up your jaw now.
Truly Facebook is a product which has scaled and improved brilliantly; catering to the needs of the old and the new. It has constantly updated its interface, its features, its technology, basically everything to be the no. 1 in the social market business. Like "Googling" is the new term for searching, "Facebooking" is the new term for social presence. And I guess there lies the big problem. The monopoly. The threat that these giants possess by being the only ones in the market.
Fb has been notorious. By reading your browsing history, tracking your location, it's constantly collecting data to target you for ads. There have been recents incidents where people have even accused Fb for eavesdropping, i.e. listening to calls. Even more, some people have even accused the giant of using the phone’s microphone to listen to everything. I am not sure how true that is but I have friends who have had this incident. Fb’s entire business model is based on data. It is trying to collect it by any means. But thats scary. To have your data in the hands of a company which only wants to sell it. And of course, Google is no different. But deep down, Google looks like the lesser of the two evil.
Anyways the point of this article is to make us realise the importance of competition. Because lets face it, monopoly sucks. Monopoly means the end of customer satisfaction and priorities. It just becomes the business of getting more money on even some unethical costs. When being asked on why Bill Gates is still investing in Bing, he responded by saying that he doesn't want to live in a world where their is no competition in search domain and all the information is controlled by one company. Which makes sense because then some big and powerful bunch of people could just manipulate the information which is being passed on to billions of users.
We recently saw a great example of this in the form of US elections. There were fake news being circulated all over Fb which spread like wildfire. Stats suggest that this was a major reason of Trump's win over Hillary in the US presidential elections 2016. Yeah, so even some junkies writing some BS about Hillary might have resulted in her loss.
I don't think any search engine is even close to compete with the mighty Google(And although I like Duck duck go, but still even that has a long way to go) but still we can and should try some other social network. And this is not tough. It’s just asking your closest friends to shift to some other competitor and eventually they can ask their friends.
Because as you already might have heard this, “data is the new gold”. And our personal data should be in our control.
