Task 22

Social Networking... or Anti-Social?

Facebook is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus.

Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries and has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service.(Use is acceptable for the purposes of the 23 Things training program.) Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times.

MySpace is a similar social networking website to Facebook with an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, where it shares an office building with its owner, Fox Interactive Media; which is owned by News Corp. In June 2006, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the United States.

Facebook recently surpassed Myspace in amount of visitors, making Facebook the most popular social network, followed by MySpace and Twitter.

Discovery Exercise
1. Explore Facebook
2. Explore My Space
3. Set up either your own facebook page or MySpace page.

Discovery Resources
There are also alternative social networking sites available. Although the principle 2 are noted above.
A development in social netwroking is the "social network service". This differs as it focuses on building online communities of people who share interests. An example of this would be LinkedIn.