Facebook schmacebook?

Facebook has 100 Million monthly active users which basically means they are the shit in social networking terms. MySpace (the former biggest) is lagging behind in developing and matching Facebook’s success. Facebook allows its users to create profiles post current info, upload videos and pictures and much much more to do with social networking. People have to use their real name to sign up for Facebook this would make it easier for members to find long lost friends and reconnect with them, in the beginning people adhered to this requirement but later people started changing their names, and simply providing false names. I have experienced this first hand. Facebook has become another social competition where people are competing with each other over the number of friends they have on the profile. It has been reported that people are complaining about the 5000 friend limit. This is more than 50 times as many friends than I have in my modest inventory. My best friend first made me attentive to Facebook. I had a couple of other social networking profiles: Hi5, Tagged, etc. So I wasn’t very excited to join Facebook as well it was simply too much of a hassle I thought, but my friend told me that it was super duper easy to sign up. So screw it I gave it a shot, selected the nicest picture (sexiest picture) as my profile picture. I had no idea you could adjust so many settings, and the amount of info you can input is just ridiculous. After having updated my profile and inputted the info I was willing to, I soon started experiencing the true magic of Facebook, I was being tagged in pictures all over the place, I looked for people and within a week I had over 100 friends. The “Poke” button is simply magical, I had so many poke wars over the first few months it was ridiculous. Facebook was officially my new addiction. I am now a fully integrated daily user (I like to call myself a connoisseur) I keep up to date with everything happening and new developments on my profile; Though lately I have been using Facebook mostly for reminiscing about the past and recently finished high school career. I also use it to maintain my connections and keep my networks in touch, but it has stopped ruling my life, and it has calmed a lot since all of my friends have moved and there is no more events to take pictures of and share on Facebook.

The new generation has no problem throwing their personal details out in the open: address, phone number, age, sex, full name, family history (in matter of speaking) and in the description they try to make themselves sound the most appealing to their age group. This often means they are not in the slightest bit appealing to future employers. They post their pictures online of the weekend bash, college parties, etc. this will also reflect negatively on the person in question. I didn’t like the fact that my full name was on the listing in the directory, simply because it made me feel uncomfortable to have my entire full name on the website so that anyone could find me and friends me. I felt also increasingly uncomfortable that people could see my profile without my permission, I was even unaware that this was possible until read various articles advising the increased privacy settings. This is why I altered my privacy settings, and anyone who wants to see my profile needs to friend me, I don’t friend anyone that I do not know or have never spoken to in person, I will also accept friends from my friends, as long as I can see the connection to me then I friend them. I do not friend people simply because they are good looking or say something interesting. But with all the screening, and increased privacy I think that my profile is quite safe to future employers trying to pry in my past. Even if I friend my future employer they will still not find anything compromising about me, but there is a certain part of me that wants to keep my professional and social life separate.

Recently Facebook took a leap, and introduced the new version of Facebook. This has come across much resistance from many users, even though I was apathetic at first I am now more supportive though there are certain flaws that need be fixed when browsing photos and other aspects I think it has potential.

This concludes my haphazard article about facebook I hope you nonetheless enjoyed it.

--Roger’s Opinion