Monday, November 3, 2008

Social Networking and Virtual Worlds

In the past few years, social networking over the internet has boomed to become incredibly popular, not only with the younger generations, but everyone. The two most popular social networking websites currently are Facebook and Myspace. Facebook was created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of his friends as a tool for Harvard students to communicate and keep track of each other, but obviously since then, it has grown to worldwide proportions. Not just used for college students to post silly pictures of one another, Facebook can be used by professionals to communicate with one another about their jobs, look for other employment opportunities, etc.

The other social networking monster is Myspace. Myspace can be used by businesses and artists to promote themselves. You can search for people in your area (you can do this on facebook too) and add them as "friends", to show them your page. Myspace doesn't require you to put your full name as the display, so it is harder for you to find someone if they don't have their actual name in the directory.

Theres always a dark side to these new and evolving social networking technologies, as television shows such as "To Catch A Predator" have shown. Many people take advantage of naive young people who use the websites and lure them into bad situations. Hopefully in the future, these problems will be taken care of and prevented from happening, with increased security and watchfulness over the content and what goes on through these websites.

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