Social Networking

Social Networks are a big part of almost everyone's life. Many people have many different social networking accounts. Some include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. The list goes on and on, it seems like there is a new social networking platform popping up every week. There are different ways that these technologies can be used. LinkedIn, for example, is considered a professional social network. You can connect with your colleagues and classmates while also reaching out to new people. It can be used it a corporate environment to help people get to know each other and  have a virtual business card in a sense. Reaching out to recruiters and setting up lunches and coffee dates with people you want to network with is a way that LinkedIn is used. These technologies can be used to reconnect with loved ones that you may not have talked to in a while. People will usually search their names on Facebook and connect with them there. There are downsides and disadvantages to using social networks heavily. Profiles are public by default and in order to make your posts and information private you need to mess with the security settings on the different sites. Even Randi Zuckerberg, sister of the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has had issues using Facebook and with the privacy settings. A photo that was posted that she meant to be private was able to be seen by the public eye. She did not want this to be the case and did not properly use her privacy settings to prevent this from happening, especially since Facebook always rolls out new privacy features to its site and it can get confusing (Greenfield). These technologies can be used to also help provide valuable information to people around the world. Sites like Amazon and Yelp have features where you can rate different items and restaurants and leave reviews. These features allow other people to learn about the restaurants and the products before they end up trying them out. While these features can be beneficial, it does not end up providing much help when a very limited group of users leave these reviews across multiple restaurants and products. For example, only 5 percent of active Amazon users cast votes on more than 10 products. A handful of users voted multiple times (Grifantini). These different social networking technologies will end up evolving in the future. Certainly new sites will pop up and become popular while some of the current ones may not be as popular as they were. I feel that much of the younger social media users are using Facebook less and less and other platforms like Twitter and Snapchat more. Different features might be available on current or new sites, such as more personal interactions with other users on the site or other improved ways of communicating.

Sources:

1. Facebook Privacy Is So Confusing Even the Zuckerberg Family Photo Isn't Private,” The Atlantic Wire, Greenfield, R. December 26, 2012 http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/12/facebook-privacy-so-confusing-even-zuckerberg-family-photo-isnt-private/60313/
2. Can you trust crowd wisdom? by Kristina Grifantini, MIT Technology Review, Sept 16, 2009. Available at: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23477/?a=f