Faith

My neighbour's kid speaks to God
daily, in sing-song, in Urdu I think -
I saw a woman kneeling with her baby
kneeling all the way to the alter of Madhu Church,
and sitting under the cool shades of the Sri Maha Bodhiya
an orange sunset reminds of an ever omnipresent,
With the energy of Mecca, like a sand-storm
like a rock concert in slow motion,
just drops in an ocean of human faith.
Keeping us strong when we most need it.

Muslim pilgrims at Koneshwaram Kovil, Trincomalee

A prayer tree, Koneshwaram Kovil

Voodoo magic, Koneshwaram Kovil

A personal request, Koneshwaram Kovil

4 rupee luck, Koneshwaram Kovil

Losing it

Almost everyone has a cyber life these days, a sort of second life they spend an increasing amount of time on. Some people tweet, others blog, most are on Facebook and many do it all. Social networking sites have made a real difference to our mundane lives. If you have the internet, there is always something to kill boredom with, be it reading someones blog, stalking people on Facebook or just having a casual exchange of tweets with someone you haven't even met. But when compared to the other kinds, Facebook has the majority of users.

It was first created as a network tool for grad students but now has bloomed into a full-blown social networking site with over 350 million users. Up until a few years ago, it wasn't all that popular, back then Hi5 and Bebo were theshiz, everyone needed to have a Hi5 account. But due to its non-existent security settings, Hi5 became saturated with cyber sluts and perverts, not a very pleasant place! So then there was the exodus from Hi5 to alternative like Orkut, Facebook and Bebo. But out of them, Facebook stood out because of its simplicity and user friendliness.

But now it seems to have lost that all these third partyapplications on it. I mean before when you log on in the morning, its only that someone has commented on a photo, or your status which by default began with 'is' or even posted on your wall. But now when you log on in the morning, some idiot has 'thrown something at you' or someone wants you to 'fertilize their flowers' and yes, I mean that in a virtually literal way. It's either that or someone has taken a quiz on 'what you eyes say about your future' or some rubbish of the sorts, I mean WTF?! don't people have anything else to do!?

To add to the needless spam you find your politicians' faces floating around when nearing an election. Facebook always sends out this statement on how they are trying to improve security and all that but is security the only concern? How many pointless applications are floating around the place, with the potential to mass spam? I mean, instead of trying to complicate the security settings they should deal with all the applications that are popping up before Facebook turns into anotherHi5.

Facebook Politics

Right side of my Facebook page was splattered with all these pretty faces for the past few weeks.oh where have you gone? :(

 

Interesting Sri Lankan Facebook Stats

Well, this was not the post that I intended to write but, when trying to research on Social Media engagement in Sri Lanka, just came across some interesting Facebook facts derived straight from their own Advertising platform.
It gives you great options to filter your target markets with custom segmentation, most of the figures are just from playing around with the advertiser dashboard.

So lets start

As of March 2010

Males Dominate!

There are 501,520 Facebook users who live in Sri Lanka (those who have indicated that they are located in Sri Lanka) out of which 320,100 are men and 172,640 are women. Another 8780 have not disclosed their gender.

As a percentage close to 65% of Sri Lankan Facebook users are male. And around only around 35% are female.

More Lesbians than Gay men?

Well, that may be a hypothetical statement but if you go ahead to check “Interested In” feature you would find that there are 12,400 Men who are interested in Men, and 35,800 women interested in women. J

So if we take this figure as a percentage of each gender 3.87% of Sri Lankan Men on Facebook are interested in Men, and 20.67% of Sri Lankan women on Facebook are interested in women.   :O


The Facebook group called Sri Lankan Gay Friends has close to 1000 members. and the Facebook Group Lesbians Group in Sri Lanka has close to 600 members.

Who you gonna vote?

In the past few months we saw heavy political activity in Facebook, even now you could see many candidates advertising on Facebook and so many updates on different political fan pages. There was a close game between the two presidential candidates with much being spent on constant advertising. The Facebook Fan Page stats at the moment are as follows

Mahinda Rajapaksa (http://www.facebook.com/mahinda2010) - 56,702

Sarath Fonseka ( http://www.facebook.com/sarathfonseka ) - 63,150


Do you like Kottu?

Although you could consider many Sri Lankans to love “Kottu” when you filter out the number those who actually are a Fan of a Kottu Rotti Page or who have Kottu Rotti mentioned in their profile information is only 5380. No matter how popular Kottu is amongst Sri Lankans since many of them have not associated themselves with that word, Facebook has not been able to collect the correct sentiment with regards to Kottu.

What’s your Lingo?

Ok so we have the three National Languages, Sinhala, Tamil and English. In Facebook many of us have set our default language as English (US) with  451,000 using it and only 46,060 using English (UK).

But did if you check other languages you would get some interesting figures,

320 Facebook users in Sri Lanka speak Español (Spanish)

270 speak French

And an interesting 20 users speaking Hebrew

Of course the accuracy of this would differ according to whether the user has specified this on their language settings.


Sports Update

There are 55,0810 who like Cricket and only 6220 who have mentioned their interest in Rugby

Creepy

There are 180 Facebook users who like Satan and 20 of those who like Osama Bin Laden…and there are 4589 fans in Anarkalli’s Official Facebook Page!!!

So anyway Facebook is a place where different tastes, ideas and people come together, its interesting see how this social media platform has risen to popularity in the recent past, when i checked Facebook some months back there were only around 350000 Facebook users but now its over 500000. Its interesting to see how Facebook is influencing our lives and how it is impacting our country as a whole, i think i might cover it on another post.