Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook.com in 2004 while studying psychology at Harvard University. He created the term because it was the name of the books given out at the beginning of college with pictures and names of the freshman class. It has quickly become a nationwide social networking phenomenon. Now among the 100-most-visted websites in the world, Facebook is the second largest social network on the web. (Myspace placing first) The network was extended beyond educational institutions to anyone with a valid registered email address as of September 2006. Recently the company announced that the number of registered users had reached an astonished 30 million.
At the basic level, the site allows users to create and maintain profiles which contain personal, academic, and contact information. One of Facebook’s original features is called ‘groups’. Users can either already existing groups or create ones of their own. This feature would be displayed in their profile. Users are capable of easily finding others who share similar characteristics to themselves. For example, if someone list Bottled Up in their “Favorite Books” section, then the site allows them to click on this and see all other members in the system who listed this book as a favorite as well. Overall Facebook’s most popular and used feature has been the ability to upload photos. Unlimited photos can be uploaded by users whether it is via their cell phone or web. Another rapidly growing feature of Facebook is the events which provide the users to organize, attend, and plan for events/parties. Along with this users can also invite and recommend friends to an event/party. The site’s features are continually developing. Users can now give gifts to friends and post free classified advertisements and even develop their own applications.
Among those 30 million users I’ve chosen to take a look at a specific Facebook profile, my cousin Dorothy Rogers. Whether at work, at home, or on her cell phone she is constantly contributing to her Facebook addiction. As she calls it, “my one stop destination for keeping in touch with anyone and everyone!” After signing in, she starts off by checking her news. News feed is an update you receive of all the actions your friends have taken within your network. In an instinct she was informed one of her friends posted a new album and with one click she was brought to their page; being able to view their new photos. While taking a look at Dorothy’s profile there was no surprise to see shortly after signing up on Facebook, one of her first ‘actions’ was – “Dorothy Rogers installed the Facebook for Blackberry application to her phone.” Currently with 210 ‘facebook’ friends, she has 9 uploaded photo albums with about 50 photos in each album. Eighteen additional photos could be viewed of her but were from other friends albums which she had been ‘tagged’ in. (Tagged being a Facebook term of also being in a photo of someone else’s album.) Each user has a wall on their profile that is a message board feature used to post any length message to a friend.
Dorothy’s wall is overloading with all different types of quizzes she has taken from “What are you afraid of?” to “Who is your celebrity twin?” One requirement of all users is to provide their precise date of birth. With this information Facebook displays a list of “Upcoming Birthdays” on the bottom of all users’ homepage listing the upcoming birthdays of the users’ friends. With her forgetfulness regarding birthdays, Facebook’s method of ‘remembering’ them had the greatest effects of any feature in the network. She loved the fact of being reminded of birthdays without having to input them more traditionally like she would manually into a calendar. Her use of Facebook to wish friends a happy birthday to be much higher than her use of telephones or letters. She started viewing to profiles of friends from high school and for her Fascebook became some sort of “living” high school yearbook. Explainging she found out that a classmate had recently gotten engaged. Therefore she enjoyed browsing through her friends profiles to “keep up with them.” My main concern was how personal information was being displayed. She assured me she can control what info is out there about her and who can see it. Only friends and people in her network can view her whole profile and she can set additional privacy controls by blocking certain people from viewing her profile.
Facebook has become part of popular terminology, not only for Dorothy but many users. The verb form ‘facebooked' which is directed to others, occurs often in conversations of those who are users. Example – “ I’ll facebook you when I go back on.” I’m also a contributor to the 30 million users of Facebook but I personally don’t have the time nor motivation to constantly be on it. I do find Facebook as a great way to keep in touch with old and new friends but I find to a certain extent the use of this technology prevents other forms of interaction. From observation, I find by quantifying relationships oin other user’s page, Facebook had a good impact on how Dorothy viewed her social relationships.
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Tonya--
ReplyDeleteA good choice of topic, esp. since D. is not the typical high school-college age of what some think of as typical FB user. (Maybe give a few more details about her "real" life--age, occupation, relationship status, etc.) and a good start at collecting up some details.
Researched info at beginning is quite basic--I'm not sure you need to explain so much of this. I *would* be interested to read some more specific info about how typical Facebook user is not necessarily college student anymore as demographics of users has shifted. (Also, please make note of where you got yr sources.) I'd cut back this researched info in terms of space--takes quite a while to get to yr own observations.
To consider in revision:
explanation of tagging could be clearer--how one does it, how it creates networks
maybe include more examples of status updates--what sort of things do Dorothy's friends post about? (quote specific examples--maybe changing names though) what sorts of photo albums? vacation shots or family/friend candids or what?
think about para. unity--what's main idea of each para.?--using topic sentence at beginning of para. to indicate what that main idea is (That second para. about D., for example, goes from quizzes to birthdays to reconnecting with high school friends to privacy--what's the mainidea or is it several ideas?)
I like that "living high school yearbook" quote/perception. How does that tie to the focus? Is that what you're focusing on--how FB allows her to maintain social ties and what types of ties are these? (If so, make sure to include plenty of specifics that illustrate/explain this point.) Your last sentence seems to be getting at something interesting, but I'm not quite sure what you're saying? Maybe expand/develop?