In class we touched on using Facebook to profile yourself to an employer. I'd like to take that a step further… Currently, as you are going into the job market, the key to your success is "differentiation". I submit that one of the best things you can do is give your prospective employer a web address to your site that showcases your "core competencies". This site should just be, "www.firstlastname.com" and could simply be your contact information and a short bio about you. As you progress in your career, you could add your references, a portfolio, a paragraph about your talents. Give them something to relate to you as a human being. The last thing you want to be is another bland resume in the stack. If you are going into anything in the broad E-commerce field, (esp. SEO, SEM, SMO) networking is key! On your site have icons to take people to your resume on LinkedIn or your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, or Sphinn. Your future employer is very likely to "Google" you. (60% do!) If you have a personal site, when they punch in your name, your site will be almost guaranteed to show up first. This is a key step to take now to ensure your good name. Your reputation is everything in this 21st century job market. Reputation management is an expanding field and absolutely necessary to ensure your most valuable and irreplaceable asset is not damaged. Remember you are a "Brand". A great tip from lifehacker is to set-up a Google Alert for your name. Then, whenever a new item gets added to Google with your name in it you get an email and link. Tip: use quotes around your name in the alert. Comment and tell me what I'm missing? Am I crazy?

Millions of college students have joined the world of Facebook in the past two years. Students post profiles, share their interests, clubs, favorite movies, and share messages with others at their schools.

Although it was set up so that only students could join and use Facebook, some employers have found a way in to check out job applicants, according to several college officials across the country.

When Facebook was released to the Ivy League schools, it benefited from a powerful group of early adopters. Zuckerberg isolated a need, and offered a standard solution. Facebook presented a simple approach to networking.

When individuals refer to “opening” up Facebook, they refer to the decision to make the service available to everyone, but this wasn’t the first “opening”. Prior to this, Zuckerberg made the unpopular decision to open Facebook to non-Ivy league participants. By breaking from the elitist ranks, he alienated a number of early adopters but transformed Facebook from a useful application to a billion dollar success.

What the average student doesn’t like about Facebook is exactly what propels the company’s growth. Students disagreed with the expanding community, students were upset with news feeds, upset with the onslaught of applications, and upset about the Beacon advertising strategy.

Yet these new features are the cause for some major keg parties at Facebooks youthful Silicon Valley headquarters. The expanding community quadrupled the user base, and the new applications mean users spend more time on the site.

In the world of internet advertising, if a user goes to facebook, logs in, checks messages, and leaves, he or she may have spent three minutes on the website. Now if a user logs on to do battle in Jetman, before ranking their friends from 1 to 1,000, a user spends hours a day during each login.

This propels growth, and is vital to Facebook’s revenue model. The longer individuals spend on the site, the grander the Silicon Valley Keg parties are becoming. Each time you set a personal record in JetMan a twentysomething, software engineer pulling in 6 figures a year while working half days in shorts and sandals raises his glass to you.

In 2010, just two years from now, Facebook is expected to bring in 969 million in revenue and engage about 48 million users. Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for 1 billion, but Zuckerburgh and his partners turned it down.

“Web 2.0″ was one of the biggest buzz words last year. It means different things to different people, but in general, “Web 2.0″ is the idea of user-generated and controlled content on the web — the idea of moving away from static web “pages” to more dynamic web applications (anything from google earth to ebay). This idea has been at the forefront of web programming for years, but not many companies have succeeded in implementing it.  Facebook, which has “Web 2.0″ at the heart of its design, is one of a handful of successful applications.

 The very idea of Facebook is a user generated set of profiles. Without a large enough ratio of profiles to community, the application would be worthless, which is why it made perfect sense to gradually roll out the application. This doesn’t explain why Facebook is viewed more highly than MySpace and several other social networking sites, though. I think that there are three other reasons for this. Firstly, the ease with which one can customize his profile, as well as the many different modes of doing so, are better than any of Facebook’s competitors. Second, Facebook successfully (generally…) walks a fine line between censoring crude content and ads (and who can view YOUR content) and allowing freedom for consumer-created content. The third reason is the ease of consumer-created Facebook applications (those annoying viral applications like “join the pirates in the fight against the ninjas!!!, as well as some pretty cool ones like a stock market exchange). Any programmer can grab the necessary documentation to interface with the Facebook API in short time and be merrily on his way to creating the next Hobo Wars.

 Facebook definitely has its problems, such as the mass of annoying viral applications, but it is still a work in progress. Think of the basic state it was in four years ago when we could first get it at Grove City, and think of where it is today. It could be anywhere four years from now, but I’m guessing that it will have more of a focus around consumer-created applications and become a programming environment in its own right, much as the World Wide Web has today.

 -Blake Ingram-