Week 7: Social Mania

                Thing #15: Facebook

FACEBOOK

                http://www.facebook.com

                Okay, here’s one of the big ones (finally, in Week 7)! We’ve all heard of it, we’ve probably all seen it, they made a movie about it, some of us have posted pictures of ourselves trying to tp our friends’ cars – but what are some of the most common Facebook features? The thing about Facebook is you can lock it up pretty tight, and they do some secure things automatically for you, too (so no need to worry about too many people seeing that mug shot). In fact, you can’t even search for people or pages through Facebook (not even Ashton Kutcher) unless you are logged in to your account. And even when you are logged in, some Facebook members can prevent you from seeing stuff they’ve posted. As an example of a Facebook page, let’s look at the page for our library: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Marcellus-Free-Library/116902788365896

Our page is public, but you can’t search for us unless you have a Facebook account, so the only way to see the page otherwise is to go to that URL (website address). However, the way around that is to Google search the person you want to see and the word “facebook” – but if their page is private, you won’t be able to see much. Once on our page, you can look at all of our posts and photos, but you can’t comment unless you have an account. Facebook started out in 2004 as a rival to the social networking site MySpace, but with some restrictions: you had to be a college student to use it, and no businesses or organizations were allowed to create pages. The site quickly took off after college kids started using it, and nowadays every organization, celebrity, and grandma in the world has a page! (Businesses jumped on board because they figured it was cool to have Facebook pages, but sometimes the information they offer is a little useless, to be quite honest.) Let’s look at a few other pages:

http://www.facebook.com/Ashton

http://www.facebook.com/Dr.Seuss

http://www.facebook.com/theloraxmovie

http://www.facebook.com/fayfreelibrary

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Buddy-Hackett/113223425359127

                Thing #16: Twitter

TWITTER

                http://www.twitter.com

                Twitter is an idea no one really thought would take off – but now everyone has a page! It can be a lot of fun, because your posts are limited to 140 characters (that means every letter, space, and punctuation mark counts toward the total). But this also means people can post a lot of ridiculous time-wasting jive all day long. The flip side, though, is that major events can be posted before the media gets a chance to – so for example, soldiers overseas can tweet about something big that just happened, and end up breaking the story to billions of people before ABC can put lipstick on Bill Weir! Like many other Web 2.0 sites, you can link your account with other services, like Facebook and UrbanSpoon, so posts you make on one of those services can be simultaneously posted to the others.

                Like Facebook, Twitter is also largely locked down so you can’t search Twitter unless you have an account or use Google like with Facebook. Many celebrities are on Twitter, and a couple years ago Ashton Kutcher and Larry King actually got into a “battle” to see who could get more friends. It may come as a shock, but Kutcher won. So what do people typically say on Twitter? Let’s look at a few different uses:

                http://twitter.com/wearethedead -- Remembering the names of Canadian armed forces members who died.

                http://twitter.com/schwarzenegger -- Thousands of tweets from a former bodybuilder/actor/governor.

                http://twitter.com/janetevanovich -- A cute way to use Twitter, with a different quote from one of her novels every day.

                Thing 17: Google +

GOOGLE +

                https://plus.google.com/

                Well, we knew it had to happen eventually – Google does everything else, so why not social networking? The big difference with their service, however, is that you can create “Hangouts” and video chat with multiple people at the same time. You can also build “Circles” so you can designate who sees your different posts (for example, I could allow her friends to see my latest updates, but leave my parole officer out of the loop)! All you need to do is sign up for a free account, or use your same login for any of Google’s other services.

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GO TO WEEK #8