Journal 7

"In Your Face"
How Facebook could crush Myspace, Yahoo, and Google

By Christopher Beam

In today's society it is not uncommon to find that many people network by ways of the web. The Internet has created immediate avenues to the latest news, networking, trivia, and so on. Facebook is on the up rise as a sufficient social networking site that may soon offer a one stop shop for all web surfers. Christopher Beam compares Facebook to Myspace as a social networking site without all of the spam and unwanted requests. He goes on to say that recently Facebook has launched a new tool called Facebook Platform that allows for many other programs to be downloaded. To mention a few, Graffiti allows you to doodle on a friend's site and the honesty box allows you to leave anonymous notes to friends. If this site really takes off it could be very beneficial to youth, for a wealth of knowledge, all the way up to major corporations to use for networking purposes. A major criticism is that it needs to have a direct email system, RSS, and IM to be in direct competition with others like Yahoo and Google.

Is a one stop shop site realistic?

I know that sometimes I am overwhelmed by the Internet and all it has to offer. I think that if there was a site that I could do everything on and it was user friendly, I would use it exclusively. I think that a site like that could be a great foundation to having a customized site for myself with everything on it that I would prefer.

Should young kids be able to access it?

I wish that we could have customized pages for kids to use that had security checks on it. I have seen some of my friend's kids use the Disney and Nickelodeon sites and they love them. It would be cool if they could have sites that could be protected to ensure that they couldn't access any unwanted information.