I think I speak on behalf of most of the class by saying we had a ton of articles and videos to view for this blog posting. And that particular video that was over 40 minutes long seemed to be a little much. However, and I swear I am telling the truth, I watched the whole video from start to finish. It was very informative and very true. Not only did it have Mark Zuckerberg telling about his theories on his creation, but it also featured the creators of Digg, Napster, Craiglist, Twitter, Myspace, etc. You don’t hear much about these creators as much as you do Zuckerburg, probably because there isn’t much controversy behind these other sites. First, I will talk about social networking for individuals and then will move onto social networking for businesses.
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INDIVIDUALS:
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A quote that popped out at me while watching Download – The True Story Of The Internet “People Power” was “Everyone is connected to everyone, however distantly.” For example, I know someone named Bob who knows Jan who knows George who knows Hank who is a friend of Britney Spears. Does that make me a friend of Britney? Probably not, but it does make me connected to her even though the line of friends from me to her is pretty lengthy.
While watching the video Twouble with Twitters: SuperNews! I found myself disliking twitter more and more. Yes, Facebook is a social networking site, even though Zuckerberg says it isn’t, but Facebook also has apps, a messaging system, chats and various other elements that coincide with one another and Twitter doesn’t. Twitter does one thing, status updates. In this video it was said by a character that they don’t exist if they can’t tweet. This is a belief of most people whether they know it or not. Its as if we aren’t living or thriving without hopping onto our favorite sites, exploring its new content and creating a sentence or two of our daily occurrences.
So why is it that “content is created by the crowd?” Because we are starting to move in to an era of the people. We have outlets now that allow us to speak our minds while keeping it PG-13. There are blogs, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that all give us an open forum to just talk. How many of us can rant and rave about almost anything? And how many of us have friends that will sit there and listen to you rant and rave about those things? Probably not very many. These social networking sites let you say most anything, with the exception of topics that are deemed inappropriate.
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BUSINESS:
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More thank likely if you have a business that you are participating in a site that reaches out to the general public. Those sites are typically social networking sites. These sites give you the chance to advertise all and everything a business offers.
A friend of mine works for UT Tyler. His job is literally to work with the school Facebook and Twitter and also make blogs and vlogs to entice future students. Lucky huh? UT Tyler isn’t the only school participating in this kind of advertising, SFA does as well. Because of the ability to post school events straight to a place that more than half of the students partake in allows for the school to become better and more involved. Students will check their Facebook more often than the schools site to find news.
All in all, business are moving into the realm of social networking because they know it works. They know that they can be heard better there than on a billboard, a business card, a newsletter or a web site.
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I don’t see social networking dying off anytime soon, however, I would like to see what is going to be able to top it.
{A. Rains} 