The Coming of Age for Social Networking
This past year I’ve been amazed by the use of social networking among my friends and family. In a way, it’s like Microsoft Bob for the Internet in how easy it seems for “computer challenged” people to understand and interact with what’s going on.
When I first tried social networking at the beginning of this century with sites like Google’s Orkut, it seemed like it was just the same group of geeky friends going from site to site when we would still be using IRC as our main way of social interaction.
Facebook for me started off as the same but a bit more polished. Then, for some reason, it turned into a Classmates site that was free. Following a chain of friends I found it exciting to find out what people I hadn’t seen in 15 years were doing, and how the teenagers I remembered now looked like adults.
My greatest Facebook amazement is in its use by my family and family friends. These are people who don’t use computers much (some don’t even have one). As a type of multimedia notice board and messaging solution, its use has really kicked off and has become an accepted form of communication.
Now I think I have some new posted photos and statuses to look at. What are you doing right now?
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Randall Donald is the system administrator for Hosting Nation Data Inc. Hosting Nation provides hosting packages and hosted applications to everyone.