Social networks

Social Network, Facebook & MySpace

Facebook and MySpace a social networks which helps with communication and file sharing. This technology has taken over the world; many people use it from a high school kid to large companies in the work force. Facebook and MySpace are websites that can now be used without cost and anyone can join by simply making a profile, inserting a picture and adding other member. These websites are utilized to network, to make or maintain friendships. ‘Facebook is a social network website that began on february 4, 2004 This website is owned and operated by Facebook, Inc., the parent company of the website and a privately help company. It allows users to join one or more networks, such as a place of employment, a school, or geographic region connecting people and making them interact.’[1] ‘The name of the website refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a Campus community that some American colleges and Preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff they do this so they all get to know each other’.[2] So who found Facebook? ‘Mark Zuckerberg, while still a student at Harvard University. At the beginning this website membership was initially limited to only Harvard students, but was later expanded to include any university student, then high school students, and finally to anyone aged 13 and over.’[3]

MySpace is a ‘social network website offering 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, California, USA, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox interactive Media; which is owned by News Corporation, which has its headquarters in New York City’[4] According to ‘Alexa Internet, MySpace is at present the world's fifth most popular website, and the third most popular website in the USA, though it has topped the chart on various weeks.’[5] The service ‘gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites in 2006. Today its traffic is similar to that of Facebook, a competing social network.’[6]MySpace allows you to create a web page and design it to your taste’, ‘profiles contain two standards "blurbs:" "About Me" and "Who I'd Like to Meet" sections. Profiles also contain an "Interests" section and a "Details" section. In the "Details" section, "Status" and "Zodiac Sign" can be added [7]. Users have the advantage to express them selves by adding interests and allow other people to view their profile. ‘There are features such as ‘Bulletins’ which are posts that are posted on to a "bulletin board" for everyone on a MySpace user's friends list to see. Bulletins can be useful for contacting an entire friends list without resorting to messaging users individually.’[8] Facebook has similar attributes as you are able to see other peoples friends and you may add, poke or even just view their profile or even photos without even been their friends, there is less privacy in facebook as it allows you to view what others write to their friends so everyone is informed. Both these sites allow you to message other people through composing a message in the inbox but also display messages as you can leave a comment on their page or on a picture they have chosen to upload.

There are other similar forms of social networks that are arguably similar to facebook and myspace, these are; “bebo” and “hi five”, these network work similar when it come to messaging leaving a comment on profiles or photos, you can add your age star sign or even occupation, relationship status, whether your female or male and even annual income.

How does this technology help us with our collaboration project? With networking we are communicating, we are sharing information, we are upload and downloading, we are file sharing and leaving comments of what we have done and how we have done it and what will be done next, we are able to see the progress of ones work and vice versa, collaboration is made using these websites as the group uses pages such as Facebook, MySpace, bebo, hi5 or even blogger which is used to communicate in this class, it is all used to collaborate together, assisting one another and this is how it is helping us with our project by file sharing therefore file viewing and also communicating ideas for the project and with regular updates this technology helps us cooperate with each other.

There is evidence that people in the work force use these lets works to collaborate and communicate studies shown through Microsoft, among the highlights of the study: 66 percent of Millennials regularly access social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at work, vs.13 percent of other workers.’[9] ‘less than half (45 percent) of Millennials stick to company-issued devices or software as opposed to nearly 70 percent of other workers.’[10] This shows that these social networks are used for collaboration during work.