Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Facebook Before/After/Drawbacks

I had a little bit of trouble finding some worthy information for life before facebook. Basically what facebook helps us do is to enter your friends from various networks or , including your own network. The facebook software then creates a "social graph" and makes it useful to you. The social graph helps you visualize the locations of your friends and allows you to search via general location, school, or even company. You can use this graph to see who your friends know as well as mutual friends. This allows your social graph to expand much faster and easier. Before there was an application such as this, it was very hard to see who your friends knew or who mutual friends were without contacting individuals and trying to coordinate and find out these details. An obvious drawback of this is that people rely too heavily on facebook for their social networking. If facebook were to suddenly disappear, all of the info would be lost and there would be no quick way of recreating your social network and recovering your social graph. It seems that facebook has made every one dependent on the technology and no longer knows how to network the "old-fashioned" way with writing down contact info and carrying a portfolio of business cards around with you, or even owning a Rolodex.

1 comment:

Leo C said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/04facebook.html?ref=technology