New features are good or bad...

New features of social networking sites and search engines have “enhanced” our social lives and or searching capabilities. The one feature I will be talking about is the face recognition from Google and Facebook. Face recognition is similar to a digital camera feature. For example, when my digital camera takes a picture, a square appears in my face, the family members, and or friends I have added to the settings. Now, someone can take a picture of you and obtain more information about you. Using a picture of your face, information can be found over the internet. For example, let’s say you have a blog like this one and your blog has a picture of your face in your profile. Later, someone takes a picture of you with their smart phone using their Google application. This application will connect your face to your blog or any other site that contains a picture of your face.  Facebook is trying to launch an application based on this same idea. I think this new feature is just creepy. Sometimes Facebook is creepy as it is. People you don’t know send you friend requests, people from high school you never spoke to want to be your friend, and or people you don’t talk to at work want to be your friend, well you get the idea. Now imagine if someone can take a picture of you and find you on Facebook.

People might say that this could be a violation of privacy. However, when you open an account with Google or Facebook you always agree to terms and conditions that are always subject to change. In other words, if Facebook officially releases something like this in a smart phone app you always have the option to delete your account. Remember, no one is forcing you to use this social network or search engine.

That’s the Truth,

Mauricio

Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/google-face-recognition-app-in-development-2011-03

http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/12/16/5660488-facebooks-facial-recognition-knows-who-your-friends-are-

MySpace it’s still so cool, man.

People at work have the “whatever happened to MySpace” conversation every now and then. I think I have the answer, using common sense. To tell the truth MySpace is pretty cool. You can customize your profile, you can add pictures, you can add videos, you can have friends comment on your page, and more. MySpace was so cool that even right from the start you will have Tom, the co-founder of MySpace, as a friend. Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, didn’t do that. If you had or still have a MySpace page you understand how cool it was.

If it was so cool what happened to MySpace then? Well, your friends happened. The only reason any of us have a social network is because of our friends… maybe because of our family members. Think about it back in the mid- 2000s. Why did you open a MySpace? Simple, you opened a MySpace because your friends did. So when you got older, graduated high school, started college, and had a .edu e-mail, you opened a Facebook profile. You opened a Facebook profile because one of your friends thought it was cool. “People want to go on the internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that?” Mark Zuckerberg says that in one of the lines of the movie the Social Network... Even though, MySpace already existed.

In 2007 when you didn’t need a .edu email to open a Facebook profile, MySpace started dying very slowly. It seems like MySpace didn’t do anything to try to keep people going back to their site or having people log back into MySpace. The truth is that they did, but probably no one saw it because they were on Facebook. One of the things MySpace did was to do a reality Web show called “Getting Married on MySpace”.

MySpace also failed to go internationally early. For example, I am Colombian and I still have most of my family there plus a lot of childhood friends. I remember asking one of my friends if they had a MySpace profile in Colombia, he had no clue what I was talking about. Facebook serves pretty much all of the world when MySpace might serve international, but not that many people think MySpace is better than Facebook in other countries.

Well let’s just say that Tom thought 1 million dollars was cool and Mark thought 1 billion dollars was cooler.

Now in 2011, the new question is, can

MySpace come back from the death and be popular again? The answer is NO! Simply because I doubt your friends, or you, would think now in 2011 MySpace would be cooler than Facebook. Now, MySpace has tried to be like Facebook so much it lost its coolness and originality. MySpace is now called My_____ (get it My than a Space). Also, MySpace now will allow you to tag your friends and change your status, just like Facebook.

The bottom line is that MySpace is cool, it’s the same as Facebook, but if no one accesses it, who is going to know if MySpace is cool or not? Let’s just say that MySpace is an application for Facebook now, since you can connect to MySpace using your Facebook account. In addition, Facebook it’s so cool that they have their own movie.

That's the truth,

Mauricio

Sources:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Myspacee-is-so-last-year/178242637154

http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1285016/

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/03/news-corp-set-to-unload-myspace/

http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-media-stats/2010-social-network-analysis-report/