Week 7 - networking, socially.

Hai.

Long time, no Web 2.0.

This post is all about social networking. Social networking sites are one of the defining tools of the Web 2.0 era. What could be more relevant to connecting with other people and contributing to the distribution of information than looking at ugly photos of the people you didn't like in high school?

In any case, there's no denying that social networking has changed the way that people can interact with each other. Many of the social networking sites have tried to tap in to different types of human interactions. Some examples of this are LinkedIn, a site designed to maintain professional networks, Ning, a kind of social-network/fansite hybrid, Bebo, which seems to be exclusively a community of fifteen year-old girls, and Myspace, which is mainly used by bands because of it's easy-to-use music upload interface.

Then there's facebook, the site developed by a group of Harvard University students with a laughably callous attitude to its users' privacy. It purports to be less trashy than its Myspace/Bebo predecessors, but is really just less visually customisable - looking more like a university forum than a Justin Beiber fan-blog.

There are a variety of privacy, intellectual property and advertising concerns surrounding Facebook and other social networking sites - the difficulty in deleting accounts, facebook's use and ownership of user's material and to what extent external parties such as your school or employer can care about what you post to your social networks (see here, here and here.)

I have a facebook profile, and have a love/hate relationship with the site. While its useful for seeing if your friends are attending a show you planned to go to, or to confirm the date of a particular event, this must be offset against the imortalised unflattering photos, seeing the endless status updates of the ex-partners of friends who you barely knew, and the car-crash-esque "can't stop looking" element of the human condition that leads you to look at photos of your ex's overseas holiday or that party you weren't invited to.