Journal 7

“In Your Face, How Facebook Could Crush Myspace, Yahoo!, and Google”
By Christopher Beam

In today’s online world there are different ways to get yourself your own virtual hangout. Depending on your interests there are a variety of user options. Myspace is three times larger than Facebook, but is full of unwanted ads and spam. There are others such as iGoogle and Yahoo, so Facebook is taking a stand by giving itself a makeover to compete with the giants. They are proud that they do not have all the spam-infested messages or friend requests sent from spammers found in myspace. But some people are critical of the makeover. Facebook is adding a feature called Facebook Platform, which opened its pages to outside web developers. This allows anyone to get inside Facebook and rearrange it anyway they want. The most popular new addition so far is called “Graffiti” which lets you doodle on other peoples profiles as well as leave messages in an “Honesty Box”. So far 3.3 million people have already taken advantage of this feature. But others are still waiting for some “real” features to be added that will improve their productivity. So far just useless applications are being added. Are they doing enough to stay up with the other sites? Probably not. It’s time to add beneficial content such as an online wallet or introduce some sort of RSS feed for news-real news. Don’t give your customers and excuse to move to another site. Make sure you have everything that would be useful and not wasted space. It will take time to see how Facebook makes out in the end, but there seems to be too much competition offering a lot more features leading the way.

What online social network, if any, do you belong to?

I tried to stay away as long as I could from joining any social network. My brothers and friends pressured me for a long time to join Myspace and become their “friends.” Once I finally gave in and joined, I added to the top of my profile “Joined Against My Will”. I didn’t want anyone thinking I had all the time in the world to “play” online. But after a few minutes on myspace I was hooked. It was so addicting looking up old people I hadn’t seen in years. Then out of the blue these people were contacting me and it was like the past ten years never went by. Well, of course a lot has changed in the past ten years, but seeing all the different age groups and user pages and being in such easy contact, it felt like we were all still connected.

Would you introduce a social network to your class?

Absolutely not! I want to teach 4th grade and I think they are way too young to be having their own myspace pages. I have watched enough Dateline NBC “To Catch a Predator” to know the dangers of online predators. I would let them know these sites exist in their education of the internet but I would strongly encourage their parents to keep an eye on their child’s internet usage. Once their friend’s start joining, it is almost inventible that they will, but with responsible usage and parents watching over, there should hopefully be no dangers in socializing with friends in these social networks.