As a result, Facebook has refined its growth strategy to target Muslims in the developing world. Following detailed customer analysis, Facebook has made the following changes to its interface.
Events:
It felt that the original Event attendance with its three buttons was completely blasphemous to Muslims.
After all, when you click "I'm attending", how do you know you will attend an event, in the future? Only Allah knows the future, and therefore, the button was changed.
Marital Info:
This was targeted more towards the wealthier Arab market in the Gulf. In the original interface, Facebook allowed for the following setup.
This has now been changed to recognize the reality that upto 0.1% of the Arab men have more than 1 wife.
Poking:
Poking has been controversial ever since the feature was launched. According to Sheikh A'anta Majnun, "poking led to touching which led to dancing which led to haraam yaani boking is haraam". However, the feature could not be disabled for the Muslim world as it was discovered that many Muslim men liked to be 'poked' by non-related women. Therefore Facebook arrived at a compromise and allowed men to poke a women's "waali" (guardian) back if he was so inclined.
The feature was disabled for Muslim women, as their 'poking' responsibilities were delegated to their "waali". On a related note, most women have not yet 'friended' their "waali" (this is yet to be solved: one solution recommended delegating all 'friending' requests themselves to the "waali" but that is being debated).
Pictures
Photographs and tagging friends has long been Facebook's unique features, and this was tweaked slightly for the Muslim users of Facebook. An app titled "Muttawafy" automatically scans and ensures that pictures conform to strict guidelines followed by Muslim women.
As an aside, for some reason this feature, while it was introduced a while back with default setting "on", was found to be disabled by most desi men.
12 comments:
too funny!
Haha! This is hilarious. I was quite surprised at the fall in numbers using Facebook over the month of May - 6 Million people in North America is quite a large number. I do understand how they feel though, it can become quite exhausting!
This is so funny, Mezba!
hilarious!
Funny and stupid,Id say!
I'm not quite sure what to say. :o
Mezba, you're too effin' crazy!
Great stuff - love it.
i never like facebook in my lifetime
@Luckyfatima, thanks, it was a spur of moment post!
@Azra, I think a lot of these people might be older folk who joined but didn't know what to do lol.
@Nadia, :-)
@Sunehra, :-)
@Lat, hehe.
@Khanum, ..... :-)
@Safiyyah, lol.
@Dave, thanks.
@Didta7, what about now?
Very funny.
@Jack Point, thanks.
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