The total Facebook users in Malaysia has surpassed the 12 million mark. On January 1 2011, there were a total of 9.5 million Facebook users in Malaysia. Last week, it has reached 12 million. As of today, the estimated total stands at 12,060,200.

With a total Internet users of 17.5 million, the Facebook penetration in Malaysia is just a whisker shy of 70%.

From January 2011 to December 2011, the Facebook user base has been growing at an average rate of 26%. The growth rate is markedly reduced compared to the last year’s rate of 87% (March 2010 – December 2010). The growth rate is expected to decline further in 2012, with the increasing level of Facebook penetration in this country, continuing privacy concerns, onset of Facebook lethargy, and onslaught of emerging new online time sucks.

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Malaysia is one of the three countries (the others are China and Iran) cited by the leading US Internet entrepreneurs in an Open Letter to lawmakers in Washington. The Open Letter opposes the proposed Protect IP Act (PIPA) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which US lawmakers are currently discussing.

According to the letter, both Acts threaten to “give the US Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran.”

The signatories of the Open Letter include Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), Jack Dorsey / Evan Williams / Biz Stone (co-founders of Twitter), Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal), Chad Hurley (co-founder of YouTube), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn), Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!), and Pierre Omidyar (founder of e-Bay).

Sergey Brin posted on his Google+ page on why he supports the Open Letter:

In just two decades, the world wide web has transformed and democratized access to information all around the world. I am proud of the role Google has played alongside many others such as Yahoo, Wikipedia, and Twitter. Whether you are a student in an internet cafe in the developing world or a head of state of a wealthy nation, the knowledge of the world is at your fingertips.

Of course, offering these services has come with its challenges. Multiple countries have sought to suppress the flow of information to serve their own political goals. At various times notable Google websites have been blocked in China, Iran, Libya (prior to their revolution), Tunisia (also prior to revolution), and others. For our own websites and for the internet as a whole we have worked tirelessly to combat internet censorship around the world alongside governments and NGO promoting free speech.

Thus, imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free speech has come from none other but the United States. Two bills currently making their way through congress — SOPA and PIPA — give the US government and copyright holders extraordinary powers including the ability to hijack DNS and censor search results (and this is even without so much as a proper court trial). While I support their goal of reducing copyright infringement (which I don’t believe these acts would accomplish), I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world.

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This is a pretty meager matter but it can be quite annoying if you start to mull over it.

IKEA Malaysia is celebrating Chrismas on Facebook with its “It’s Time to Celebrate” app. The app is accessible via its Facebook Page. The following illustrates how IKEA currently setup its Facebook Page to welcome new fans (specifically, those who haven’t Like the Page yet):

Step 1: A new fan goes to www.facebook.com/IkeaMalaysia.

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A total of 1.2 billion people (15 years and above) watched 201.4 billion online videos in October 2011 alone, according to the latest comScore report.

It is not surprising that Google Sites (with YouTube as the key driver) is the top global online video destination, with 88.3 billion videos viewed during the month. Youku, China’s YouTube, is in distant second with 4.6 billion videos viewed and VEVO is third with 3.7 billion videos. Users of the world’s most popular social network, Facebook viewed a total of 2.6 billion videos on the platform.

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Twitter fairly captured the essence of 2011. Below is a list of top 16 events tweeted this year, ranked by tweets per second (TPS). TPS as a yardstick to measure the intensity of reaction by Twitter users and thus, signifies the level of significance of an event.

Only five events in the list were dominantly US-centric, namely Troy Davis execution, NBA Finals, East Coast Earthquake, Home Run Derby, and Superbowl. The others have more global appeals. Yet another indication of growing internationalization of Twitter.

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In the proposed Malaysia’s Computing Professionals Bill 2011, the term Critical National Information Infrastructure, or CNII refers to:

those assets, systems and functions that are vital to the nation that their incapacity or destruction would have a devastating impact on National economic strength or National image or National defense and security or Government capability to function or Public health and safety.

An IT asset, system and function can be considered as CNII as long as it is vital to the nation. How vital? As long as it is vital enough to cause a devastating impact to the country as the result of its incapacity or destruction.

We know digitalization is inevitable across the globe. IT systems are playing more and more significant and mission critical role in all facets of society, including the way we conduct commerce, the way country defends against threats, health care management, and many more.

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Since yesterday, Malaysian tech people (including general public like myself) are complaining, griping, and opposing the proposed Computing Professionals Act 2011 on social media – blogs, tweets, Facebook updates, Google Plus, and others.

BUT, if one didn’t skip Page 6 of the widely circulated draft version of the proposed Computing Professionals Bill 2011 (shown below), it is stated that the proposed Act “applies to the Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII)”.

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Twitter just unveiled its latest interface iteration. It now neatly arrange into four key sections – Home, Connect, Discover and Me.

• Home The landing page where you see all the tweets of those you’ve followed. And I like the fact that photos and videos are now embedded directly in the Tweet streams.



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You walk into a local shopping mall one fine Sunday afternoon and notice a crowd gathering at the concourse area. You approach the crowd trying to find out what the fuss was about and then you see it: Darth Vader and his Imperial Stormtroopers have decided to drop on to our little third rock from the Sun to expand their Imperial might on us puny humans. But wait, they’re also on a drive to gather donations for charity?

Well, if that’s the case, then you may have just stumbled upon the 501^st Legion. Specifically, the Malaysia-Brunei Outpost of the 501^st Legion.

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Apple released their latest and grandest operating system for their iDevices, the iOS 5 on 12th October 2011. I’ve had it installed on my iPhone and iPad 2 for a week now so I thought I’d share my views of it so far.

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