I have had a facebook profile for approximately one year and access it most days, so for this week's homework, I was initially going to work off that, but decided against it for a number of reasons; mostly because I wanted to start afresh with applications and what I am putting on my wall in the context of this course. My other facebook page has a year's worth of applications and threads with different people, and it used mostly for contacting my friends socially and following their lives.
One of the benefits I have found with having a facebook page is that I am able to keep in contact with people which, for whatever reason, I do not see as much in day-to-day life, but still want to have some way of communicating. I have also ound facebook very handy when it comes to keeping in contact with people who are on holidays or are away for a long period of time.
As with anything on the web, I am always a bit wary of what is put up on my page and what information is being distributed. There are a lot of applications which are fairly useless and there are some that ask for money or in some way try to trick you into giving your personal details to a company for 'free' products. As I have used more applications on facebook and put more entries and photos of my life, I have increased security settings to suit.
One of the advantages of adding photos onto facebook (as an example) is that security settings can be customised to suit the particular album. Over time I have been able to limit certain albums for access only for certain members of my family or to certain friends. Furthermore, there is always the ability to remove an application from your wall if you no longer feel the need for it or you do not wish for this to be a part of your profile.
In my new facebook profile, I have added our buddy group as a 'closed' group. At this stage, I have sent out three invitations to join the group to the members of our group and added one friend already on facebook whereby we can communicate as a sub-group on facebook and directly communicate with the members of the group. I have also added links from my blog and from my google reader account on facebook on sujects relevant to libraries or sites that I have found useful (This will be a work in progress as each week we learn of many different and useful sites).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It's great to hear your thoughts on facebook. One of my criticisms of the site is that I don't necessarily want to share everything with everyone but instead show selected photos with specific people. Now that I know I can customise my security settings for each photo album I might use the site in the future.
ReplyDeleteI agree - I certainly do not want anyone to be able to search for anything on my facebook and sometimes only want certain people to be able to view certain attachments/comments/links.
ReplyDeleteSomething that has just happened that I found interesting was that I had marked one ad as 'irrelevent' and that I did not want it to come up on my facebook (it was an ad with nicole ritchie on it advertising slimming secrets), though I found that when I logged on again that particular ad was back up. I am not sure what this means and have marked it to no longer come up on my page, but I will see what happens when I log on again...
I was very wary of Facebook and have only signed up to fulfil the requirements of the course. I was uneasy with the idea of having my profile made accessible to anyone and everyone. After exploring the site more thoroughly I found out about the privacy settings and set up my profile to be viewed by friends only.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I signed up, one of my best friends from high school started messaging me using the instant message application. I don't see her as often as I might like and enjoyed our online conversation. I usually like to catch up with friends in person, but I'll take any contact I can get over no contact at all. I also agree that it is a great tool for staying in touch with people overseas or living a long way away.
I can now see the potential and value of social networking sites such as Facebook in connecting people through the free flow of information. This information is organised and packaged by online technologies for easy distribtion and consumption.