The Pros and Cons of An Online Social Networking

Do we need a Bill of Rights for the social web?

There is no doubt everyone wants to feel comfortable when they are using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster etc. The social networking brings not only opportunities to conduct our own media and social network but also provides more challenging market in favor of consumers. As Scoble says there is no rule book for blogging and this is “Come as you are conversations”. The authenticity is the core value that makes blogging such a new and different way for business to communicate. As much as being real and accurate in blogging, both companies and individuals reach to”success”. There are many examples of blogging by companies and individuals but now they have been realizing the value of social networking. For instance, Cisco Systems, a Silicon Valley heavyweight, plans to announce one of its most unusual deals: it is buying the technology assets of Tribe.net, a mostly forgotten social networking site, according to people close to the companies’ discussions.

Opportunities, Challenges and Risks

Once we carry this issue through social networking platform we also need to think about risks and rights for users of the Social Web. Let’s question the attractiveness of Facebook and other networking sites. Why they are so popular and addictive? Why MySpace attracts 70 million users, why Facebook has 27 million uniques?

What is Facebook’s secret sauce?

Is an enthusiasm knowing more and more about others who might be our friends, associates, family or their network? Supposedly I know who are close friend of mine. I already know their interests, backgrounds and current activities. How about the person who I do not know him/her that much or do not see for a while or have any single clue about? Am I strongly interested in their identities? I think we need to make rigid description of “FRIENDSHIP” in this point.

First, I need to categorize my friends as how much intense and extent ties with me. We can aggregate them as “Top Friends” or classify in different place. According to Jeff Jarvis, Facebook is a confused social space for that because there are too many different facets of personality being exposed through social openness. I agree with that. Whatever I make any configuration or change on my profile it is accessible through newsfeed for not only my friends but everyone. This point needs to be managed.

“BEFRIEND”

Moreover people can get invitations from people who actually are not their friends anymore or never have been. How are they going to deal with that? If they are not able to make decision whether they would accept this invitation or not by themselves they will not feel secure and comfortable while using their network place. The only solution is befriending someone but this time it is look like a discriminating someone. If I do this publicly I could be punished to do that somehow. This creates many misconceptions.

“Are Identities under the risk of theft?”

The another risk is identity theft. Some users of Facebook and MySpace routinely place information such as their date of birth,relationship status, locale, workplace and work history or even their address,email and phone number, right in their profile without any restrictions about who sees it.”

I really liked the way of this description on social networking: “People don’t put a sign on their front yard or apartment door listing the dates they’ll be away on vacation and all of their personal data. But, “people are doing just that through the growing phenomenon of social networking Internet sites, where members post pictures and current information about themselves as a way of keeping in touch and sharing information with “real world” friends, business associates, family and classmates,” states Grant Thornton senior forensic manager David Malamed. http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2007/01/c6097.html

For all those purposes we strongly need to have an ownership of our own personal information such as own profile data, the list of people we are connected to and activity stream of content we create. Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites as they are the requirements of A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.

GOOGLE AS A DATABASE OF OUR INTENTIONS

WE SHOULD NOT AFRAID GOOGLE, “Unless it ensures our privacy”

               John Battelle discribes Google as a ‘The Database of Intentions’ and continues: “This simply is an aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered and every path taken as a result”. The description of Google, made by Battalle, looks like a meaning of one simple word in encyclopaedia at the first stage. However “Google” is not a simple case as much as it’s description.

                When  I first started to read about Google and the circumstances that it has created; negative and positive consequences of using it, I didn’t know how much Google means in everyone’s life.  Then I realized that whatever I do on computer my fingers find “G.O.O.G.L.E” letters unintentiously. We are talking about most powerful media company in the earth and most rapidly growing company in the Wall Street. In less than a decade, Google has become a corporate colossus.  (Number of Employees: 12,238, Revenue in 2006: $10.6 billion, Profit in 2006: $3.1 billio n, Share of the U.S search market: 53.7 percent, Global Unique users in March: 528 million.) 

                Google relatively provides various advantages and disadvantage as its nature and size. I believe the most important issues we need to discuss are that the function of Google on our privacy and impacts of its monopoly in economic life. 

               We need to consider that Google provides a service what others find very useful and helps people to find informations at no charge and with one click.

                According to Battalle this informations represents in aggregate form a place holder for intentions of humankind a massive database of desires, needs, wants and likes that can be discovered, subpoenad, archieved, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. http://battellemedia.com/archives/000063.php

                Moreover Google letting advertisers promote their wares to those poeple in a finally targated way. Google’s book search product, arguably helps rahter than hurts publishers and authors by rescuing books from obscurity and encouraging readres to buy copyrighted works.

                There are many further Google tools that contribute more and more convenience to our lives such as GoogleMaps, GoogleNews, GoogleMail, GoogleReader, GoogleScholar etc…Each one was created to supply our intentions.  So far so good. Therefore Google is a capitalist tool and a useful one.

“New MICROSOFT“

               On the otherhand we need to pay much more attention to it’s unrivalled financial assets and technical wealthiness of Google in its category. This may create giant monopoly. Actually it has became a monopoly already.  Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. Thus other search engines will not be successful as much as Google in the  far future. If we look from this perspective Google might be our only media.  http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070119_001510.html.  

“Why does Google remember information about searches?”

               Finally we came to privacy issue that Google has created. Why Google needs to keep our searches? However they recently announced a new policy to anonymize their server logs after 18-24 months. They declare that immediate deletion of IP adressed from their logs would make their data systems more vulnerable to security attacks, putting the personal data of Google’s users at greater risk.  http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/why-does-google-remember-information.html According to their new policy announcment,  they have rights and purposes to keep that information such as helping law enforcements in the investigation and prosecution of ” serious crime”.

               In conlusion, if Google adequately protect privacy, everyone around the world can get benefits from its functions. There are both risks and benefits of using Google. I believe big potential of bad use of Google can prevented by a legitimate agreement that place between consumers+state+Google.

DISCUSSING+SHARING= CULTURAL EVOLUTION

DISCUSSING+SHARING= CULTURAL EVOLUTION

I believe the society who talks and discuss that is a democratic society. People are needed to communicate and interact with each other in order to gain more accuracy and democratic culture in the world.

As members of the world community we used to have grassroots’ media tools to understand each other, to know rest of the world and also to be known by them. TV’s and Newspapers still have been doing their jobs as an initiative and massive media tools for centuries but this time we do have both interactive and informative one: INTERNET

Internet’s charming, useful and beneficial features that were created in every single day provide us many opportunities to manage our own communication tunnels. There was not any chance neither to do our own PR nor Journalism by ourselves until Internet.

The media without internet was inadequate to know everything truly, properly and without disinformation. The years without internet have passed with full of negative occurrences in the world such as wars, cultural and political conflicts, and economic instabilities in general; competitiveness, monopoles, high prices, corruptions, violations of consumer rights in particular.

In contrast when the internet became part of our lives we had a chance to have unlimited alternatives to choose, to learn, and to talk.

BLOGGING= DIGITAL CONVERSATION

The blogs, as the latest interactive media channel and precious gift of internet, has brought revolutionary change to transform the way business and communication. Despite no one really see each other; blogs have helped to build more reliable and trustful place to be part of the conversations on digital atmosphere. It has never been cheap and easy to share our ideas and products with millions like that.

LESS COSTS=MORE SALE

Moreover, the Long Tail approaches to the case from economic perspective and point outs that world market has been having a huge turning point what is eventually prevents unfair wealth distributions in all around the world. We have two success stories as an example of Long Tail concept: NETFLIX and AMAZON.

We all can see that how much they are successful on the way of sharing; as a consequence of minimizing costs for both consumer and companies. For instance the large proportion of Amazon’s book and Netflix’s movie sales come from either obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores or unpopular movies. This can’t be real if we would not have an internet. We were not able to find the movie that our grandfathers have seen many years ago.

Besides Long Tail’s economic positive influences on societies we can also discuss its cultural and political impact on the societies. I believe The Long Tail model might lead to improvement in society’s level of culture as well. As soon as costs go down we would have a chance to see more competitive markets, much more alternatives and finally cultural diversity.

The only point I have been mostly considering is: “An insufficient distribution of technology would remain same in needy part of world?