Facebook turns 10 this month, but so what? Google celebrated its 15th anniversary last year. MySpace is already 11, Flickr, Digg and Wikinews will also turn 10 this year. Renren, dubbed the Facebook of China, is not far behind, established in 2005 by Stanford Business School and MIT graduate Joseph Chen.
What Facebook's achieved in 10 years has propelled it past most media rivals and demands attention and respect. Zuckerberg's creation passed the milestone of one billion active users in October 2012, becoming the largest social network in the world and one of the most patronised sites in history.
Facebooked has become a verb in the English language. At a practical level, major political parties and politicians including US presidents and leaders such as Kevin Rudd have begun using Facebook as a major electioneering platform. Corporations routinely establish Facebook pages in the same way they published corporate brochures a decade ago.
Most significantly, Facebook has sent a message to the traditional mass media and journalism, marketing, advertising and public relations professionals, as well as corporate management. Media are no longer one-way, top-down, elite controlled communication spaces. They are sites for two-way, interactive communication open to anyone with an internet connection.
While recognising that a "digital divide" still exists (for instance, among low socio-economic groups and remote indigenous communities), Facebook affords voice equally to "citizen journalists", activists, critics, marginalised voices, shy teenagers and work-at-home mums, as much as it does to powerful governments and corporations.
