Facebook in Libya

Many of the earlier Libyan bloggers are hardly writing anymore, rumour has it they have moved to Facebook. I am not sure how you can blog on FB but I understand they just want to talk among each other as their real selves.

Over the years I've had dozens of requests to join FB. It seemed like all my friends were suddenly incapable of writing emails. Email became the new snail mail.. and I was left with a dwindling inbox. I still fought back the urge to join the community, until a great friend asked me to do so and I accepted to try it for fun. After creating the account and adding him I browsed and found that as I initially thought the Libyans were populating FB fast. So many bloggers were there, so many people. Young men and women and not so young either. I found one of my brothers had an account too and I toyed with adding him as friend but decided against it as his account was gathering dust....

Also, I did not like any of the add-ons, pokes and applications so avoided them like the plague. So there you have it the number of friends in my account are counted on the fingers of one hand and I have forgotten the password!

What brought FB back to my mind to warrant this post ? it's just that I've seen a few Libyan bloggers/readers mention it...

Dream Libya thinks the facebook era is quite evil " Facebook is a way to spy on your friends, what they do, who their Friends are, the more you put on your facebook account the less privacy you will have." and from him I found out that there is a large community of Libyans online there.

While Libyan Violet has discovered that it has now replaced the traditional informal way of investigating about the bride or the groom before the engagement "Don't tell your parents about her yet man, why dont you probe about her on facebook, check her profile, pictures, list of friends and who sent her flowers. Then investigate in Hi5 and it won't be wrong to Google her name see what comes up ... I mean I don't have anything specific on her, but you never know!".

Personally I think that this tool is OK to have; as a master data of friends and acquaintances all in one place where you can check on them from time to time. Also for finding long lost classmates and friends and satisfy your curiosity about what happened to your high school crush :P. For the security conscious I think there is nothing to fear, FB will dish out whatever you feed it and you can put as much info as you wish and you can ask your friends not to upload photos of you as well and usually if they are your friends then they have no business doing so and if they are not your friends then they would put your photos online regardless of being on FB or not! If you are paranoid then you should not be online in the first place!

But the main point is that I'm glad the bloggers are still around but simply in another place and I'm glad Libyans are networking too! I may join them at another time ...