Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Facebook

After pressure from relatives, I took the plunge. I joined facebook. Facebook is a social networking website started by some young, pimply faced Harvard school dropout who is filthy rich now. It originally started as a university/college site but has evolved in it's short 4 year existence to 60 million users worldwide. It was started Feb. 4, 2004. It's even reached such notoriety that Iran and Syria block it. Of course, they probably block everything......

The information users provide on Facebook has been used in investigations by colleges, universities, and local police. Facebook's Terms of Use specify that "the website is available for your personal, noncommercial use only", misleading some to believe that college administrators and police may not use the site for conducting investigations. Furthermore, some employers look at Facebook profiles of prospective employees or interns. Information posted on Facebook is potentially accessible to employers with faculty or alumni accounts.[66] Myspace has also been used for checking out future and current employees, etc. So be very careful what you post on the big world wide web.

I've been on it now for a couple weeks and while I found many of my cousins on there I was surprise to find an entire Mitel network of ~ 200 Mitel employees including the COO and several VPs. This just proves the paragraph above. I've found many of the add on applications buggy and some have said many of them are spam generators, keystroke loggers, etc. Any applications I add I'm very careful to ensure they are used by many, many people. I suppose if I load an application that is used by many I'm under the false belief that so many people couldn't be getting screwed. hehe It is nice to share photos and I am able to stream this blog to facebook so that facebook users who are my friends can link to me or easily reach this blog. We shall see if it's of future interest to me.

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