It happened a fortnight ago during the September plenary. It was a sad day for Europe. It happened during the week that José Manuel Barroso was reconfirmed as Commission President.

Facebook was to announce that for the first time they were making profit and that users would soon be able to phone their 300 million Facebook friends for free via the site.

I also learned during the week that the German site AutistVZ.de was launching an international version called autistbook.com – “Autistbook helps you stay disconnected from your friends in your virtual life and be left alone”.

A cartoon by our Czech editor Pavel

As I said, it was a plenary week. Plenary weeks are not like other weeks. During plenary weeks we are busier, and our PC’s and internet connections slower.

This week it was worse. Each time I started Word in the morning (or in the afternoon for that matter) I saw “auto recovery files” from the last crash of the application, and Word asked me whether I want to look at them.

This functionally didn’t spare me the anger and frustration when I thought I had lost my almost finished story on solar power from African deserts and the Nabucco pipeline (that’s what we call ‘angled’)  just before calling it a day at around 8 pm.

Patience is being able to take a coffee in order to wait for a white frame miraculously somehow turning into something with content – or until you are told that “this application is not responding”.

But it did save the energy story, so I got to appreciate the ingenuity of Microsoft folks (after all, when my I-Touch freezes I do have to restore I-tunes and all the music and other files with it…).

Patience is being able to wait for a few minutes until a white frame somehow miraculously turns into something with content – or until you are told that “this application is not responding”.

But the IT guys did tell us that they were investigating the matter.

Plenary weeks are different also for our Facebook page (and this is what I was going to write about).

I have come to regard parliament’s Facebook page as my adopted baby over the past five months – having looked after it since it was a week old.

A baby, by the way, that seems to be able to walk on its own in the meantime. But as with all children – it becoming autonomous is sometimes more difficult for the parents than for the kid itself. I am trying to prepare myself for the day of separation.

Never mind, back to the Facebook paradox and the plenary: What is great about Facebook, is that you get immediate results. You’re posting something, and bang, a few seconds later you see the first “likes”, and comments coming in if the subject is emotive enough or if one of our 55,000 fans makes an outrageous enough comment.

I remember during election week-end being stunned by the fact of just how many people are on Facebook on a Sunday morning.

But what should we conclude from that? Be happy with our 55,000 fans and for the rest just shut up?

Yet a paradox was striking, especially during the calmer times after the election: When I posted something new, the number of fans actually decreased. Not by large numbers, but by up to ten or twenty fans. And it happened as immediately as the “likes” were coming in on the best posts.

In a way this is logic: A post would make people realize that they have subscribed to our page, and if they cannot be bothered, the just get rid of us.  On the other side, as long as we stay quiet, it doesn’t make much of a difference to the user whether he or she is our “fan” or not.

But what should we conclude from that? Be happy with our 55,000 fans and for the rest just shut up? Hardly a reasonable choice. It would somehow defy the purpose of the page.

The bad news about last plenary was this: The number of fans we lost on the way, over the five months, crossed the ten thousand mark. 10,000 lost souls for the European cause!

Should we have posted less, or different? Less informal, more formal? Should we have censored more posts (we hardly did)? Choke off the “Vaclav Klaus appreciations society” (one of our early “fans”)? Or reinvented him when he went quiet? We will never know.

Yet the plenary week which started with this sorrow date, and which apart from JM Barroso did “not exactly rock” (Western Balkans: 36 likes, 11 comments;  SWIFT debate 43 likes, 10 comments…), ended with encouragement:

It proved what I had observed a number of times. Even if people leave our page immediately after a post, when and if there are heated discussions ensuing and many “likes” are posted, with a bit of a delay the number of fans begins to grow again, making good the initial loss (certainly because friends of our fans become aware of the page, and join perhaps to engage in the discussion).

The plenary week ended with a post about Parliament criticizing the draft Lithuanian child protection law which is to prohibit “dissemination to minors of information whereby homosexual, bisexual or polygamous relations are promoted”. This post, illustrated with the film poster of Brokeback Mountain, drew 101 comments and 356 likes, and more than 100 added fans over the week-end that followed.

PS: and what about the future?

There are reports about people banning Facebook from their (virtual) life. Yet the number of new users still seems to be much bigger than that of the quitters.

And I have witnessed a colleague telling me a couple of months ago that he quit Facebook. Last week I saw him back with a status update, about something he read years ago during university on a bench…

There seems to be no day going by without another company, non-profit or media organisation starting a Facebook page and I see myself becoming a fan or supporter of this or that, basically in order to get information in my daily Facebook feed, it becoming in a way what Igoogle aims to be.

I, for one, am not convinced that this means Facebook digging its own grave, as others have argued.

When we started the European Parliament Facebook page in April, we weren’t exactly the first ones – in fact one of our informal benchmarks was: “as many fans as Doctors without borders would be nice” (the Director); we achieved that (but they are close to overtaking us again).

Still, we were a bit ahead of most of the crowd, and more or less everybody, including myself, was surprised how well it worked, not only in terms of the growth of the fan community but also in terms of how well people engaged in discussions.

Therefore it is probably quite natural that others, especially those involved in EU communications, want to hear “how we did it”. So the boss and his deputy and myself we are giving presentations here and there.

I do feel a bit out of my depth talking about communicating with future generations.

Sometimes I am not sure whether we really can deliver what we’re asked for: This week I am supposed to give an input on “IT tools for future generations”.

While I made a great communication effort when our colleagues’ three recently born babies where over in Rue Montoyer for a drink last Friday, I do feel a bit out of my depth talking about communicating with future generations.

It also makes me wonder whether I should introduce my almost three year old son to the wondrous world of Twitter and Facebook, lest he’ll be growing up on the wrong side of the digital divide (and that after he made his first appearance on youtube within a day after his birth!).

As far as Parliament’s Facebook page and the future of our other social media activities are concerned, we will do what bureaucrats and other sensible people do: we’ll have a workshop to figure it out.