Facebook brings Internet access to millions

Facebook is joining up with a British firm for a new "Connectivity Lab." Nice to see they are doing something that has great potential to bring the Internet to more people.

Here's an excerpt from the news story today on The Telegraph website in the U.K.

Facebook has launched a 'Connectivity Lab' to explore new ways to beam internet to parts of the world that are not yet connected.

In a blog post, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is investigating the use of drones, satellites and lasers to make affordable access to basic internet services available to every person in the world, as part of the Internet.org project.

Over the past year, Facebook's has worked with mobile operators in the Philippines and Paraguay to help three million new people access the internet. The Connectivity Lab will aim to extend this work with the invention of new technologies capable of reaching more remote areas in developing countries.

Read more here: 

Can social media make you more popular?

We used to measure our popularity and successful relationships by the number of friends we had; those who exchanged birthday cards, met for lunch, sat on the front porch on a summer night. Now, though, our "friends" are measured by the activity in our social media sites.

How many followers are enough to make you popular? If you have more social media traffic, are you inclined to make more frequent posts? Are thousands of online friends better than a few true friends? Is social media an effective way for you to keep in touch with close friends?

A recent Writer's Digest article posted counts for notable pageviews for writers trying to prove they have a decent following for their work.



Notable numbers are high, starting with:

20,000/month for blogs
5,000 followers for Twitter and for your own email newsletter.

By those standards, most of us are lurkers - reading just the blogs and Facebook/Twitter feeds we can scan in a few minutes.

It's summer, and we know where our real friends are - out on the porch, waiting for us.

Face2Facebook review

I don't usually post book reviews on this site. They generally go here....

But this one is for all you social media users who, like the author, don't understand the meaning of "Friends" and "Like" anymore.

Very clever concept: Woman begins to wonder about the value of having hundreds of 'friends' on Facebook. Are they really friends? What about these people she's never met?

Well, in face2facebook, Arlynn Leiber Presser set out to learn who all her friends are. After failing at many things in life, seeking a purpose, and never made a big mark in life, she created a plan to see how many of these so-called friends she could meet in a year.  Continue reading at GoodReads here.