Blog Social Networking

              

               In 1997 the first social media site that everyone can agree actually was social media was a website called Six Degrees. Six Degrees allowed users to create a profile and then friend other users, similar to social media giant Facebook that most people use today. Fast forward to 2017 and social media has become a daily part of everybody’s life. Social media today consists of thousands of social media platforms, all serving the same but slightly different purpose. For example Instagram caters to the kind of person that communicates through photographs best, and other platforms such as Twitter are perfect for those who communicate in short bursts of information.

            When signing up to a social media platform you are asked different questions such as, age, gender, residence, relationship status, education, etc. Than you start communicating/networking with friends, family members and even strangers. Without knowing you have also agreed to share your location and allow cookies to adapt to you system, which means retail stores now have access to your preferences while you are looking at their website. For companies the social networking era has been great, it has allowed them to target customers in regards to what they are interested and also market their products to a bigger audience with the use of hashtags. This era also provided many new jobs in marketing analytics and individuals who focused on platforms as a gateway to communicate with their consumers.

            In article in the New York Times Magazine, “Facebook Exodus” written in 2009, Virginia Heffereman friend, Cariline Harting told her, “But then came the truly weird part: “Facebook was stalking me,” Harting wrote. One day, on another Web site, she responded to an invitation to rate a movie she saw. The next time she logged on to Facebook, there was a message acknowledging that she had made the rating. “I didn’t appreciate being monitored so closely.” This was the dark side of social media.  Little by little people started to see their privacy invaded and fallowed by leaving platforms such as Facebook.

            With the same theme of having so much information stored in these social platforms, an article in Network World, Carniege Mellon students made a proposal to predict the success of Internet startups by incorporating social networks into the traditional Delphi method of forecasting as part of a competition from Venture Capitalist Charles Moldow. The students noted the success of the Delphi Method, which is an iterative process developed by the RAND Corp. in which a panel of experts anonymously answers questionnaires and the results are summarized by a facilitator over two or more rounds until a consensus emerges. This article was written in 2010 and gave a glimpse of what was ahead. Individuals were using social media as a way to find the best results because most of the world is there. The use of private information from people was a hot topic back than and still is.      

            With the ever-evolving use of technology there is bound to be more advances in social media. Who would have imagined that short videos messaging would be next big thing? I truly believe that as social media advances, social interactions between humans will go on a decline. My little cousins barely talk to one another, they are stuck to their phones 24/7, and I’m not exaggerating. Kids are using social platforms at a way younger age than we ever did and I believe that society has to realize that this will only hurt the way we interact in the not so distant future.