With so much internet activity in the last two years, it is easy to fall behind on new trends with regards to social networking and new online exchanges.
I remember going through some of the hype when I was at school when hotmail started to gain popularity. It wasn’t long before instant messaging – icq, msn, yahoo chat rooms – started taking up all the free time of highschool students, not to mention mobile phones and text messaging.
I was in the loop from the beginning but somewhere along the tack I fell out of the loop and now as an adult I have to discover the new fads on my own.
I think that the emergence of facebook has been a real turning point in the way we create meaningful networks on the internet. Myspace also created a lot of hype at its beginning but I think it was viewed as too informal to be used seriously by the older population. It wasn’t long ago also, when youtube came on the scene and you could easily spend a good 2 hours viewing average quality and weird footage from fellow internet users around the world.
When I first heard of facebook I thought it would be a one year hype over what I thought was a gossip machine that looked like an open version of an email interface. After analysing facebook again recently, I realise how well they have integrated all the successful tools of modern internet communication.
To me, facebook to some extent is more or less a mixture of:
- Hotmail – an email client
- Google talk – an embedded instant messaging client
- Flickr – an online photo gallery
- Twitter – similar to the extent of the status updates (micro-blogging)
- Blogger – layout is similar to a blog, and all accounts are uniform
- Youtube – you can upload and view videos without having to visit youtube anymore
So once you have facebook and realise that you have more online friends than numbers on your mobile phone, what else might you need to enhance your internet experience?
The nice and easy thing about facebook is that it gives people with limited technical knowledge the chance to maintain the closest thing to a personal blog or website without asking them to download anything or even learn much. The technical requirements for usage is for most people, just a step away from being a capable email user.
Having said all that, I don’t have a facebook, twitter, myspace or flickr account. I will resist the temptation for now however, I am curious to see which application will last the longest.
What really gave this new communication medium credibility was the use of such services for the US Presidential election campaign. Everyday, candidates would upload a new video to their youtube channel or change the headlines of their blogs. It made the business community view these teenage fads with more interest than before.
While I don’t have the need to spend an extra hour a day learning about the lives of my acquaintances, I am content with having some space on the internet to share thoughts without feeling too deprived of my privacy. I like the fact that I can decide whether or not to notify my real-life people network of my site or not. I am not bombarded with information of friends that might not be interesting to me.
I also feel a sense of achievement in creating a blog. I have chosen the url, I have set it all up, I can customise it the way I like and in the future I can scrap it all and start again. It’s not too hard to get into blogging, but it does feel better when you have set up a site and customised your blog rather than just open an account with a free service.
Note to self: If I write more often then my articles could be shorter and easier to digest. Thanks for reading, those who managed.
Facebook I enjoy the most… as u said it integrates most of the other applications into 1 and makes it a 1 stop shop most of the time.
Another advantage of using facebook is its large following. This increases the possibility of finding people, because it is such a popular service. Just by entering email addresses or full names you will get connected with people you never thought you would. The “people you might know” feature is also a common way of finding friends as well as the ability to view the friends list of people already on your network. I think that facebook makes it hard for other social networking providers because of its centralised approach and ability to offer everything you need in one bundle. Some service providers have opted to work in conjunction with each and provide compatibility in return for ongoing usage. This is a positive for users as they are not forced to choose one over the other, they can enjoy all the latest trends at once.
Facebook I enjoy the most… as u said it integrates most of the other applications into 1 and makes it a 1 stop shop most of the time.
Another advantage of using facebook is its large following. This increases the possibility of finding people, because it is such a popular service. Just by entering email addresses or full names you will get connected with people you never thought you would. The “people you might know” feature is also a common way of finding friends as well as the ability to view the friends list of people already on your network. I think that facebook makes it hard for other social networking providers because of its centralised approach and ability to offer everything you need in one bundle. Some service providers have opted to work in conjunction with each and provide compatibility in return for ongoing usage. This is a positive for users as they are not forced to choose one over the other, they can enjoy all the latest trends at once.
Haha, pretty strong of you holding out in not joining the herd on facebook!
Yeah I reckon facebook’s large following is an advantage, but I reckon it was kinda nice before it got so big. When I first got it back in 2006 you could only join with a university email address and so it was more likely the people on your friends list were actually friends. When they opened it up to everyone you started getting all these random people adding you who you knew 10 years ago or who you spoke to for two minutes at a party once. And now there’s heaps of spam and people fwding you quizzes and rubbish and telling you in their status when they get out of the shower/eat lunch/do anything…
Haha, pretty strong of you holding out in not joining the herd on facebook!
Yeah I reckon facebook’s large following is an advantage, but I reckon it was kinda nice before it got so big. When I first got it back in 2006 you could only join with a university email address and so it was more likely the people on your friends list were actually friends. When they opened it up to everyone you started getting all these random people adding you who you knew 10 years ago or who you spoke to for two minutes at a party once. And now there’s heaps of spam and people fwding you quizzes and rubbish and telling you in their status when they get out of the shower/eat lunch/do anything…
I have seen other people’s facebook accounts and find that sometimes the wall feature can be bloated with irrelevant comments and quizzes and stuff that dilute the content relating to you.
I also think that sometimes more information than necessary finds its way there. You can’t even send a cheeky comment to a friend without all of his seeing it.
Here is role-play example of what I mean: http://foliovision.com/seo-tools/marketing/facebook-dangers/
I have seen other people’s facebook accounts and find that sometimes the wall feature can be bloated with irrelevant comments and quizzes and stuff that dilute the content relating to you.
I also think that sometimes more information than necessary finds its way there. You can’t even send a cheeky comment to a friend without all of his seeing it.
Here is role-play example of what I mean: http://foliovision.com/seo-tools/marketing/facebook-dangers/