Blog Social networking

Social networking has made it easy for us to connect with friends, family and even strangers. Through social media we can share things about our life and things we see that we find fascinating. We even have the control of who we want to share this information with. Because social networking makes it easier for us to connect with others there are many ways to use this technology. According to Frank Langfitt, recruiters are using social networks to find ideal job candidates and it is easier than the traditional way. Shally Steckerl said, “I have a thousand contacts that could potentially lead me to 100,000, now I have 8,500 contacts that could potentially lead me to 4.5 million." Social networking enabled him to find more people for the job with less contacts. However, with all the benefits that social networking can bring there are always downsides to the technology. Google and Facebook were not always considered to be competitors but after Facebook signed a partnership with Microsoft it became clear that they were competing to get online ads. Google uses algorithms to define our searches while Facebook collects our personal data and uses it to give us a more personalized search result. Because these two companies are in such a fierce battle to get ad deals and collect data on us Google and Facebook may not always putting us the consumers in their best interests. A practice Web 2.0 evangelists said in Fred Vogelsteins’ article, “that the company values its proprietary data more than its users' experience.” This is a huge problem because we might not be safe with all our information on Googles and Facebooks servers. There must be a reason they are competing for our data. I believe there will be many more forms of social networking that will allow us to share even more facets of our lives.   

Citations:

Frank Langfitt. Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting. NPR, March 16, 2008.

Fred Vogelstein. Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan to Dominate the Internet — and Keep Google Out", Wired, July 2009