What are you doing on Facebook?

Yousuf Bashir Qureshi is not busy - he is engrossed. And he is not engrossed with one specific idea - he is actually immersed in all of them, simultaneously.
Qureshi, a designer and the founder of the Commune Artist Colony in Karachi, has been trying to connect art and artists with the local Karachi community through various events which are held at the Commune.

Men taking a break from the protests in Tahrir Square, Egypt. Recent events in the world, the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, have the future prospects of social media and its’ effect in the spotlight. While real uprising and demonstrations spread across the region like an epidemic; only rumours of such protests have spread through the grapevines in Pakistan. - Reuters Photo

“Every Friday, movie night,” said Qureshi. “We have food, drinks, sheesha, and a good movie - Ashraf, is it on Facebook, already?”
“Already done,” Commune Artist Colony Director Ashraf Kalim Ahmed said. “We have put some choices up for movies and given everyone a chance to vote on it.” “We have almost 130 people ‘attending’ on Facebook so that basically means 40 will actually show and that’s a pretty decent crowd.” “It will go up,” said Qureshi, as he gestures with his hand raised in the air and draws a cost curve in the air. “Then it will go down, afterwards it will steady out.”
But it is not the first time the Commune has used Facebook for promoting its’ events, nor will it be the last. As any story goes - there are two sides to everything. As time-consuming social media seems to be, it has grown rapidly in the past year among people, businesses, and in politics of the small population of netizens in Pakistan. Facebook was officially launched in 2004 and Twitter was launched in 2006. Facebook has an estimated 500 millions active users and 70 percent of their users are outside the United States. In 2010 alone, there were 7.9 new Facebook registrations every second across the world.
Read more »