Facebook – the Marmite of Social Media, love it or hate it.
Facebook first launched in February 2004, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and a few others; membership was restricted to Harvard students but later expanded to other Ivy League colleges and by September 2006 had reached most universities in the US and Canada.
Membership was offered to employees of various companies and by 2007 Facebook had 100,000 business pages. Its International Headquarters were set up in Dublin in October 2008 (according to wikipedia).
It is virtually incalculable as to how many accounts there are now but the latest statistics state there are roughly 2.8 billion monthly active users, making it the biggest social network media worldwide.
BUT all this activity brings its own set of problems.
Profiles are constantly being hacked, from people being told they have to pay for a parcel to be delivered to grand fraud. Many people using Facebook are unaware that when they answer a simple question such as “Where was your favourite holiday”; “what food will you never eat”; “name the favourite place you have lived” the information they give together with information on their profiles can, at the very worst, give hackers information they require to clone to accounts and take over your life.
Be very careful about what you say about yourself. Facebook is flooded with ads which they also ‘match’ with your likes and dislikes, as do most browers these days..
Many people joined Facebook to keep in contact with families around the world to share photos and stories. Later a large number of interest groups were set up for like-minded people. Hence the decision by the website team to set up a Facebook page for West Farleigh. We do get regular critics who can sometimes be quite rude but these are outnumbered by the positive and helpful comments
On the pro side, our Village page informs our friends and neighbours of local events and fundraisers for the church and local charities. How many more people attend our village events because they have seen them advertised on Facebook?
Filling our West Village Facebook page can be an onerous task as previous editors have found, especially when no-one likes or comments on the various pieces of information that is shared. It can be time consuming searching for interesting titbits such as local road closures, events in Maidstone town and the wider county; information about police, the council and other major organisations.
On the whole it is very rewarding to receive so many messages from friends and neighbours asking us to post images or stories from around the village. Our most successful postings over the last few years have around West Farleigh In Bloom and especially the Annual Sunflower Competition, village celebrations, scarecrow competitions.
I hope we can continue to grow our Facebook page, which we like to link to this website www.thefarleighs.co.uk and the parish magazine, Lifeline.
Sincerely Jacky Taylor
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