Hey guys,
After reading the articles by Clive Thompson and Mark Zukerburg I found out that scientists use reality mining by tracking people with location aware devices like cell phones to understand how social networks functions. What is interesting about this is the privacy of the user involved. There needs to be some mechanism to make sure that the privacy of the user is not compromised. This type of information can be useful to people like direct marketers but it can cause a lot of inconvenience to the actual person being tracked. This could soon turn into a security issue too as the technologies for cell phones evolve very fast and more personal information can be stored on them.
It is also been seen that people interact better through real world social networking rather than on Facebook. This is normally because it is easier to decipher what a person is saying when you have visual clues. Facebook is also the most popular social networking website and is growing rapidly, they keep adding more features to enable the user to share more about themselves. So the question is can all social networking sites keep increasing their capability to allow user information and at the same time keep it secure and private? And also can they do it without compromising the usability of the website to user standards?
Friday, January 15, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I find it interesting that social networking sites keep pushing for more content, but cannot provide the necessary securities to protect people's information. One thing that networking companies will never be able to do is recreate the face-to-face interactions of everyday life. Just take a walk down the street; each person you pass has no knowledge of who you are, where you went to school, or how much you enjoy watching Heroes. You have total privacy, where as in the cyber community, almost anyone can find you if they tried hard enough.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on the fact that we need to eventually stop gathering information slash and being into each others life's because it will be a private issue. Listen there is nothing wrong with learning about someone but that said information should be things that they want to share or they should get to decide who to share it with. I think there are too many devices that allow people to look into other peoples lives without their knowledge. As for Facebook and other companies keeping up with the speed that people want to interact and communicate I'm sure they will find away if they haven't already. They will always come up with some new feature to make it better, easier and more fun.
ReplyDelete