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
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