Friends are like umbrellas. They save us from being soaked when life pours itself upon us. Friends, some of whom we flaunt akin to expensive art collected over the years, valuable for our social status, but we don’t know a thing about them. Some others, we meet very rarely, almost as elusive as sunshine during rains. Lastly, there are those who stick by us like our shadows, making themselves visible when the sun burns overhead and happily fading away while we comfort ourselves in the shades of our happiness!
Friends are thus as dispensable as the breath we take; reminding us of their importance every living second of our lives, in their absence we’d truly be dead.
Capitalist & entrepreneurially fertile minds have increasingly found ways to monetize this emerging need for socialisation, affiliation and addiction to social belongingness. All of us need witnesses to our lives, nobody wants to die unnoticed. We all want to archive our lives, want to preserve it for posterity and subconsciously hope someone would find it interesting enough to revisit it while we are gone. All of us are born to tell stories, we are born to listen to them.
This has created an entire psychological ecosystem whereby we ‘share’, ‘connect’ and ‘express’ ourselves to everything and everyone around us. This craving of over 800 million people has found great manifestation through Facebook. A platform which helps us chronicle our thoughts, emotions and feelings all at the same time, while enabling us to get instant feedback on it from people who matter to us. This fills a deep psychological lacuna which has existed for centuries together – ‘Our need to express ourselves and to know how people react to our expressions.’
Facebook and its IPO will be as significant a breakthrough in the history of mankind if not more significant than us landing on the moon. Come to think of it, this is the first time the human feelings, emotions and thoughts are going to be valued. Facebook’s plan to raise $5 Billion through stock sale will dwarf the $1.7 Billion raised by Google Inc. in 2004 or the $1 Billion recently raised by the gaming firm Zynga.
This is not the only mind boggling number, a peek into the draft IPO filings reveal staggering valuations Facebook is asking for. Analysts suggest Facebook could be $75-100 Billion Company. That’s 100 times the company’s annual earnings and 27 times its revenue at the higher end of its valuation. Interestingly, it translates into $125 per user. That is what my life, emotions, thoughts and feelings are going to fetch Facebook as on date, just because I chose to share my life with the world through them.
While it may seem totally out of sync with the peer Google Inc’s current Price to Earning Ratio of 20, Google too entered the market with an IPO price that was 218 times its earnings and more importantly it lived upto the hype. We now await more miracles of this capitalist day and age which will monetize more of us in times to come and show us the true value of what we’ve always considered the intangibles.
Hope now you know why, “Har ek friend zaroori hota hai!”
