BBC Technology editor, Rory Cellan-Jones, is launching a new radio series on BBC radio 4 on January 26th titled ‘The Secret History of Social Networking.’ It’s a view on how far social networks have come, where they came from, and where they might head to in future.
What is particularly interesting for me is that my wedding in Ealing on December 3rd last year features right at the start of the series, as an example of just how far things have come… I used Facebook to invite guests to the wedding and communicate the agenda for the day.
Facebook was useful because almost all my family and friends are on there. It’s true, there are some Facebook refuseniks and I had to update them by text message, and some partners of friends are not always on my friend list, but on the whole I managed to update everyone using a Facebook event.
It was an amazing day and I’m fortunate enough to have arranged a repeat of the day out in São Paulo soon. The BBC radio crew filmed a large section of my wedding in London for use in website trailers for the radio programme, so I’m going to edit together footage from their video and arrange my Brazilian wedding inside an old city centre cinema. We can watch some of the London footage and repeat the ceremony in front of a cinema audience before getting an old London Routemaster bus to transport us across the city to a restaurant for a bit of a post-second-wedding-party…
I’m looking forward to hearing Rory’s programme, though we had consumed a fair amount of Champagne by the time he started recording questions so if any of it sounds slurred then please forgive me – he should have recorded the speech parts early in the morning!
mark hillary 
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The problem, as you might well discover in years to come, is that you have placed part of yourself permanently in the public domain, where you have no control.
One day, should a new celebration be for a divorce, or a more ‘discrete’, private celebration for an affair, you and the others in your web will have a different perspective on how you and your life are presented to the world, who has access to it, what they can do with it.
I know one or two people who deeply regret their Facebook history, because their lives and circumstances have changed and they wish that they could redefine their privacy, their friends, what the world knows about them. They can’t. They’ve tried.
Facebook, marketing hype aside, is a fad like MySpace and Friends Reunited were. It will pass like they did. That investors are currently so un-tech-savvie to believe otherwise is almost laughable. A few might make a ‘killing’. Many more will lose the gamble they don’t really understand. It was only ten or so years ago that it last happened: the ‘dot com bubble’. The same blind belief that lost many a fortune then and loses money on the lottery every week will lead to lost money for most Facebook investors.
The bigger loss, arguably, will be the loss to the millions who have given up control over their personal information to follow a fad: ‘because everyone else is’.
I agree that we may not all be using Facebook in a decade, but the concept of social networking remains so it could be something else – however Zuckerberg is trying to get his tentacles into the wider web to try ensuring the stickiness of Facebook for the long term. How long before a tradable Facebook currency is launched? I wonder why you chose to be anonymous though?