The social networking site Facebook from afar can look a lot like college, with cliques and the familiar range of personalities. In another imitation of college life, the Facebook campus is wrestling with the contentious issue of speech codes.
Photo: Emily Shur
He didn't have much choice but to sell. It was summer 2006, a little more than two years after Mark Zuckerberg had created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room as a way for him and his friends to better connect with schoolmates. In the intervening years, he'd raised $37.7 million from venture capitalists and transformed his modest Web site into a certified social phenomenon.
FACEBOOK FOUNDING: Both parties seem to have forgotten Aaron J. Greenspan, yet another Harvard classmate. He says he was actually the one who created the original college social networking system, before either side in the legal dispute. And he has the e-mail messages to show it.
Roanoke's city government is taking on a new approach to boosting the region's young adult population by trying to "friend" them.
The online offensive includes opening accounts on MySpace and Facebook, and posting videos on YouTube, with Stuart Mease, the driving force behind Roanoke's quest for attracting young professionals, leading the charge.
For longtime users, the influx of grownups means that information once intended for a circle of fellow students is now available for anyone to see. That has introduced a new social conundrum: deciding whose invites should be accepted -- and how much of your profile they should be able to see.
"You can't really unfriend your mom," says Hillary Woolley, a junior at the University of California at Davis. "So I've been upping my privacy settings."
MySpace.com has found and deleted profiles of 29,000 convicted sex offenders, more than four times the initial 7,000 profiles they claimed in May. The numbers were discovered after MySpace turned over info detailing the offenders they had removed from the service. MySpace turned over the records after states filed a formal legal request.
According to Ipsos, the evolution of Internet users’ digital media and online habits appears to be transitioning “to the digital video age”. At the end of 2006, online video activities had taken over from audio as the fastest growing sector in digital media.
Two researchers at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln have completed a study on “deception in cyberspace,” and they’ve hit on something pretty interesting: In text-based chat rooms, people who are lying generally get anxious. But in virtual worlds that let people create avatars, that edginess seems to fade away. “This suggests that ‘wearing a mask’ in cyberspace may reduce anxiety in deceiving others,” the researchers conclude.
Sophos created a profile for a fake Facebook user named Freddi Staur (that’s “ID Fraudster,” anagrammed) and sent friend requests to 200 other randomly chosen Facebookers. In the end, 87 people made Freddi a friend, and nearly all of them shared some personal information — like their e-mail addresses or dates of birth — with the stranger.
RSS for user "trustteam: social networking"
The social networking site Facebook from afar can look a lot like college, with cliques and the familiar range of personalities. In another imitation of college life, the Facebook campus is wrestling with the contentious issue of speech codes.
According to Ipsos, the evolution of Internet users’ digital media and online habits appears to be transitioning “to the digital video age”. At the end of 2006, online video activities had taken over from audio as the fastest growing sector in digital media.
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