Blog Social Networking

The technological advancements that the world has made in the last 20 years has been amazing and social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are right in the middle of it. These new technologies have allowed anybody to feel like they have the whole world right in their pocket. For example, social networking site LinkedIn has had a profound effect in the job market. Maureen Hentz from the Global Listing Company said, "social networking is absolutely the best thing to happen to recruiting --- ever." LinkedIn allows for employers to look for talent from a big pool or professionals while also allowing job hunters to market themselves by creating a profile, posting qualifications, and posting your resume among other things. Another way that social networking is being used is the example of the project done by students in Carnegie Mellon University. Students joined a competition that aimed at coming up with a way to predict wether an internets startup would work or not. The key is that through social networks the student could create a virtual panel that would allow them to test out their ideas on these starts up.

Although the benefits of social networking are endless, everything has its so called dark side and boy oh boy does social networking have one. For example, privacy is a big issue when it comes to social networking. This is evident when the sister of the cofounder of facebook, Randi Zuckerberg posted up a private family photo that somehow ended up showing up on her public news feed. The person who put up the private picture apologized and went on to explain that the photo was seen because they had a mutual friend which still doesn't justify why it was able to been seen by complete strangers. Another example of the negative use of social networking is all the scams that people get caught in. Since social networking allows you to communicate with random people from anywhere in the world, this has opened the doors to crooks who are selling fake things and are scamming legit buyers out of millions of dollars a year. A spokesperson for Ebay said that over the least three years they have received over 27,000 of similar cases to the one described above and most of them start off on social networking group chats and commerce pages.

I think that in the future technology will continue to evolve and eventually we will see augmented reality intertwine with social networking sites. This is already evident from the fact that facebook bought AR company, Oculus for millions of dollars.

Citations:

     Langfitt, F. (2006, November 22). Social Networking Technology Boosts Job Recruiting. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523&sc=emaf

     Doggs, A., & Brown, B. (2010, March 23). Carnegie Mellon students to exploit social networks to predict success of Internet startups. Retrieved from https://www.networkworld.com/article/2230179/data-center/carnegie-mellon-students-to-exploit-social-networks-to-predict-success-of-internet-start.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_web_apps_2010-03-24

    NBC2 Investigators: Multi-million dollar scam being used on Facebook. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.nbc-2.com/story/38062070/nbc2-investigators-multi-million-dollar-scam-being-used-on-facebook