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This evening I spent the better half of an hour watching a French documentary about the growth of Facebook and the impact it’s having on the world. It’s one of the better documentaries that I have seen so far and it’s definitely worth watching. One thing that stood out to me during the documentary is that they continuously state that there are 150 million users on the site. According to Facebook, they have over 130 million users and based on their ad platform, there are over 133 million users.
Whatever the number exactly is, it is significant. If Facebook keeps growing at this rate, we could see close to half a billion users by the end of next year. While we will have to wait and see what actually happens, if it reaches that number, Facebook will have reached over one third of the global internet population and close to one tenth of the world’s population. Check out the documentary below, which is broken out into four segments. Make sure to turn on the closed captions if you don’t speak French.
Update
Apparently the overly sensationalized documentary wasn’t received well by most viewers. Check out the comments for more. Also, my lack of ability to accurately interpret the French commentary resulted in an inaccurate interpretation. I’ll leave you, the viewer, to determine whether or not this was a good documentary.
I can only assume that you dont understand anything in french !
This documentary is the worst piece of journalism that came out this year about facebook in France.
All the french Blogosphere is buzzing against it, the journalist critized threatened at least two bloggers of suing them !
It is a sensationnalistic, full of factual error, voyeuristic piece of so-called journalism.
ReadWriteWeb France killed it http://fr.readwriteweb.com/2008/12/08/analyse/envoye-special-sur-facebook-1ere-partie-lecture-critique/ and asked for help to shoot a new documentary.
Techcrunch France nailed it http://fr.techcrunch.com/2008/12/05/fr-quand-la-tele-parle-de-facebook/
At least two major french magazines wrote stories about the documentary bashing by the bloggers
http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/high-tech/facebook-les-blogueurs-se-paient-envoye-special_720701.html
http://www.telerama.fr/techno/envoye-special-n-a-pas-que-des-amis-sur-facebook,36957.php
and more and more…..
I myself had to write to Pr BJ Fogg from Stanford to check with him what exactly he had told the journalists, and he was equally disappointed that they only focus on the bad sensationnalist side of facebook.
In france the documentary was’nt well received at all. most of bloggers thinks it’s very bad way to see facebook and gives a awfully bad images of the biggest social network online. I can’t understand how you would misunderstood the tv-show that much :/
Any ideas what music is used in the documentary?
Bonjour,
This documentary has been heavily criticized in France because he only talked about the dark side of Facebook (check http://fr.techcrunch.com/2008/12/05/fr-quand-la-tele-parle-de-facebook/ and http://fr.readwriteweb.com/2008/12/08/analyse/envoye-special-sur-facebook-1ere-partie-lecture-critique/)
However it is the first time a web site has a 30 minutes documentary on french television.
Do you really understand french? It’s a very bad documentary from the french TV. Here a list of comments from the french blogers :
http://www.jordimir.com/web20/ractions-a-lemission-envoye-485