Gerakan Bawah Tanah - Mr. GBT

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook (as if you need this introduction - ha ha ha), is Indonesia. He met with our next president, Joko Widodo - famously called Jokowi, in Jakarta. Joko Widodo will be sworn as our president on Oct 20th. One of the photos that made me laugh (happy laugh) is this. In this picture, Jokowi showed Mark some kind of pants (I think it's a pair of jeans) from a small store in Tanah Abang. Jokowi was known for cleaning the mess in Tanah Abang. He loves to go to small places and meets with ordinary people. We call this "blusukan" (pronounce like: blue shoeq un - ha ha ha) in Javanese. Oh, btw, we make jeans in Indonesia. Those famous brands are made in Indonesia. Mark went to Yogyakarta before he went to Jakarta. Yogyakarta - or Jogja in short - is famous for Borobudur temple. Another photos that made me laugh is this. A group of tourists, not knowing who Mark Zuckerberg is, asked him to take a picture of them and he took the picture. Mark i...

Last time I wrote about the demise of BlackBerry (BB) in Indonesia and no one believed me. As you can see, BB's share is getting smaller and smaller. Android is getting all the attention. This time, I'll write my take on Facebook vs. Twitter. Indonesians love to talk. We don't write, but talk. It's just our culture. That's why the number of written publication in Indonesia is very small. Our culture translates well into Facebook. We love to tell people about our family and stuff. We love to show our photos. We love (class) reunions. Have a reunion, take pictures, upload them right away. Tell the world. Let's not go into taking photos of our food. That's another "strange" behaviors. Privacy? Well, that's not an issue to us. We don't really care. Ha! Seriously. Originally, Facebook is only accessible through web or computers. Access to computers are still limitted in Indonesia compared to cellphone. Thus, only a small number of people j...

First day of 2012. I tried to post photos, status, etc. on my facebook. They don't show up in my timeline. It shows up in main page (facebook.com) though, but it will be pushed by new updates/status. Does anybody know what's going on? I don't like this timeline, but what can I do? There's no option for old facebook view. Too bad. (App designers, read this ... give users option to stay with old look and feel.)

I have close to 5000 friends in my facebook account. Facebook does not allow me to add more friends. I guess they have design issues related to this. Let me give you and example. If I want to do something (say tagging a photo) which requires a list of names, it is so slow. It tries to download the list of all friends that I have (including their icons / avatars). I could imagine what 5000 friends will do. This is even worse with slow internet connection like what I have (and perhaps what other people have in developing regions). Imagine if I have 10.000 friends :) and this is possible. I've been ignoring friend requests because I just couldn't add more friends. Currently there are more than 500 requests waiting. Almost all of them are legitimate requests. And why I get all these friend requests? Well, I hate to admit it but I do quite a bit of talk (to univesities' students, etc.) and in each talk there are more than 100 people. If 10% of them want to be friends with me, t...

I was told that in terms of number of Facebook users, Indonesia is number 3 in the world - after USA and UK. [reference / url needed] Whoa! This is something that you cannot predict. I can assure you that this is true. In Indonesia, everybody (and his/her pets) perhaps has facebook account. Some even have more than one accounts. (One for each personality? ha ha ha.) The number of Facebook users in Indonesia exceeds the number of people in Singapore and Malaysia! Take that! Because of Facebook, many people buy BlackBerry (BB). Yes, you may want to check with RIM that the number of BlackBerry users in Indonesia is unbelievably large. I guess, we can safely say that facebook is a killer application for BlackBerry. At least, that is true in Indonesia. My point is that Indonesia is an important market for BlackBerry and Facebook. This is also true for Nokia. (Indonesia is perhaps the biggest market for Nokia smartphone, such as communicator!) Why Facebook and BlackBerry are popular in Indo...