The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2014 37 Foreign Service, which has drawnmore than 1,000 views thus far. In addition to our YouTube channel (which you will find under “afsatube”), we also post our videos on Facebook and the AFSA website for even further outreach possibilities. Word to the Wise: Join, but Use Caution The Foreign Service is full of tech-savvy folks who aremembers of numerous social networks, ranging from themost popular to some of themore obscure ones. Overall, this is a highly positive development. Many of our members serve in remote places where phone connections are not always reliable, and social media are an efficient and easily available avenue for communicating with family and friends at home, as well as colleagues around the world. While AFSA is a private entity and not governed by federal rules and regulations regarding the use of social media, our active-duty members are completely bound by those rules. Because there is little if any separation between our members’ private and public personas on social media, AFSA has noticed an increased scrutiny of individuals by the department as a result of their use of these platforms. In response, AFSA has prepared comprehensive guidance (see p. 36 and the AFSAwebsite), whichwe hope will assist our members in understanding what is acceptable and what is not on social media. Relevant FAM sections for official and personal use of social media include: 5 FAM770, “Federal Web Sites”; 5 FAM790, “Using Social Media”; 3 FAM4170, “Official Clearance of Speaking, Writing and Teaching”; and 10 FAM130, “Remarks andWritings for the Media and General Public.”The Department of State is currently working with AFSA to revamp 3 FAM4170 tomake it more “user friendly” and practical in light of the increased use of social media by department employees. In themeantime, the June 9, 2009, edi- tion of 3 FAM4170 is the version that is enforced. Overall, social media outlets have been beneficial for the Foreign Service.They havemade life overseas easier and separation from loved ones a bit more bearable. However, we encourage all mem- bers to acquaint themselves with the (regularly updated) regula- tions regarding this area. Social Media for Dummies T he story of Facebook began in February 2004 in a Harvard University dorm room. Mark Zuckerberg and his room- mates Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz wanted to create a universal “face book” within Har- vard. By March of that year, more than half of Harvard’s undergraduate population was registered on www.theface- book.com . After purchasing the URL, www.facebook.com , for $200,000, the company expanded to many other American universities and on to Europe. In 2006 Facebook became available to the general public, allowing it to grow to 100 million users in 2008. Today, about 1.2 billion users are registered to Facebook, more than 720 million of whom log in on a daily basis, and 80 percent of its users reside outside of the U.S. and Canada. YouTube was founded a year after Facebook, in February 2005, by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who initially worked together for the online payment service PayPal. The first video on their page was Me at the Zoo, uploaded by Jawed Karim. (The video shows Karim at the San Diego Zoo and can still be viewed there.) The website’s popularity quickly rose, making it the fastest growing site on the Web by the summer of 2006. Just 20 months after its founding, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock. Since then, the website has contin- ued to grow: more than six billion videos are watched each month and its users upload 100 hours of video every minute. Twitter started as an in-company communication service for the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, Evan Wil- liams and Biz Stone launched the service in March 2006. The first ever tweet was Dorsey’s “just setting up my twttr” on March 21, 2006. In 2010, more than 70,000 users tweeted at least a hundred daily messages. Today, Twitter has more than 200 million registered users, who tweet at least half a million times a day. The record for the most tweets per second was set on Jan. 1, 2013, in Japan: In the moment the New Year began there, the site registered 33,388 tweets per second. —Compiled by Communications Intern Julian Steiner Facebook has been crucial to our efforts to engage the public, specifically the high school and college student segments.