My reflection

The Internet in its initial stages was a military network which later was rolled out to the public.
Even though the technology existed, Web 2.0 has only existed since 2004.
Making social networking sites possible only from the last few years.
Social Networking for me has been an opportunity to connect with long lost friends, keep some form of contact to people who normally I don’t see and a general time wasting activity.
It has also allowed me to broaden my horizon and connect with likeminded individuals who live in different countries around the world.
Showing me their cultural differences, world views and universal values.

Apart from the nice side of Social Networking it has also become a place full of static noise.
Meaningless blogs about what someone ate or did today, sites such as Facebook with profiles that have a friends list filled with over 200 random people for no real reason, bulletin notices in Myspace that get filled full of meaningless quizzes and answers and Facebook applications that have pointless roles.

Facebook
I found Facebook to be a potential security threat based on what information can be entered in their system.
For example under account you can enter your Credit Cards' details. I don’t see how this would relate to the usage of Facebook.
I don’t like the idea that you are forced to reveal your full name.
I found application requests to be annoying and useless as I don’t actually actively use applications such as those vampire ones.
Facebook does have a invaluable “News Feed” feature which shows up to date actions done by your friends. This has been recently adopted by Myspace. I don’t see much value of Facebook since I don’t actively use it with my friends, the main reason for this is because Facebook lacks the blogging feature. The blogging feature is a central part of why I use Myspace.

Last FM
I found Last fm to be an interesting concept and it had allowed me to find music I previously never heard of. The scrobbling feature was nice it allowed to build a radio station that is available to play from any computer. I must admit I didn’t use the social features of last fm and found the neighbours list of users didn’t change from the first week I started using it.

Twitter
Never seen the real point of this and still don’t. I don’t want to text what I’m currently doing wasting my credit or knowing what other people are doing at this current time. If I’d like to know I can use other mediums to just contact them.

Delicious
I found it to be a nice way of keeping bookmarks that were available from any computer.
It allowed me to looking up others bookmarks when bored which led me to find interesting new internet sites I wouldn’t have known about. Now I’m not all into using bookmarks, the main sites I use I’ve always tried to memorise them or just learn to use Google to find them.

Flickr
I didn’t see much use of this in my situation, I’m not much of a photo up loader on the internet.
It does have its use when looking at photos taken by other people and alternatively it can be used to store images for backgrounds like in Myspace.

Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a good idea for people who have schedules that need to be shared but in the instance of myself, it was useless. Firstly the effort of inputting the data and then no one actually needs to read my university timetable. If they did they’d get a copy anyway.

41181706 - Anthony Staniszewski