“Your cousin’s wedding looked beautiful!  Did you have a good time?” I asked a fellow classmate one Monday morning.  Now to any outsider, my question would have been merely dismissed as a thoughtful way to greet a good friend after a long weekend, but I realized my blunder as soon as the words left my mouth.  I didn’t even know this girl, but here I was asking about her cousin’s wedding!  Sure we were friends on Facebook (who isn’t these days?) but we were the farthest things from being friends in real life.  I had just revealed to this girl – whose last name I didn’t even know-  that I clicked through 59 pictures of “Always and Forever… Lisa and Bob”. 

With eleven words, I had revealed to this girl whom I barely knew that yes, I followed her on Facebook. 

Facebook has made it easier to keep in touch with people, though sometimes it can lead to an abundance of information that you shouldn’t know about someone.  In theory, Facebook was made so you could keep in touch with people you do know—follow high school friends as they head off to college, keep in touch with your cousins back home—not to click through pictures and check on the dating status of people you haven’t spoken more than a few words to. 

Facebook users need to be conscious of how “involved” they are in people lives they don’t even know.  Yes, other users control the information they put on Facebook, but we also need to check ourselves with how much we know about people we don’t even know.  I shouldn’t have known my classmate’s cousins had green and yellow flower centerpieces at her wedding, but I did.  And not only did I know, but my mistake was that I told her I knew.  As a generation, we should use Facebook responsibly, not only to respect the privacy of others, but also to avoid awkward conversations. 

Ok, so most of us who are face book users are probably familiar with the frustration of logging on to find an abundance of requests for new applications, the majority of which are completely useless such as “Super poke” and “I am hungry”…

But what would you do if you found a request for a application that would connect you to a blood donation database that will contact you whenever your blood type is in need, using whatever contact method you choose.  The application “Takes all Types” does exactly that.

This is the first centralized national network of local blood donors and volunteers.  The goal is to improve communities’ local blood supplies by gathering a network of blood donors across the US and by boosting donor participation on a routine basis.

I feel like people may be more willing to give blood if they are informed of an immediate need in their area, but would this really make a change and encourage people to give blood or could this just be another face book application that may simply make us look good?

For all the  glory that is Web 2.o and the celebrated tech start-ups of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn, their appears to be a darker horizon then originally anticipated. Correlating with the current economic recession, hot tech start-ups are beginning to twindle and their valuations fall. Perceived once as impervious to the economic downturn, tech start-ups of the famous Silicon Valley are facing hard times. It has become increasingly difficult for such firms to gain the necessary funding. Not only that, companies such as Digg, have had their valuation drop like a rock.

But why are the once bullet-proof companies coming on hard times? The answer is revealed beyond the glitz and glamour that is web 2.o. While the platform idea has transformed how the Internet is conceived and the way a generation interacts, the profit-margins have come slowly. When giants such as Facebook and Digg have failed to turn a dollar in the black, something must be amiss. The culprit: venture capitalists looking for the next Google. They want to be apart of the next “Big Thing.” Unfortunately, such zeal for making the quick buck has resulted in investments in”hot idea” tech with little in the way of a legitimate revenue model.

The bottom line is that the economic recession is forcing venture capitalists to rethink where their money is placed, in turn forcing tech start-ups to carefully model a business and company on a solid foundation. Such a benefit will only improve the future of web 2.0 and get it beyond this little bump in the road.

Facebook is harmless. Not. facebook is not just the simeple “social media tool” that people like to say it is.  It causes more problems than good.  The biggest problem with facebook is that it is a huge time thief.  People spend countless hours uploading pictures, changing status’, writing wall posts, toying around with applications or “facebook stalking”.  It becomes a trap that people get caught up in and even becomes addictive.  many people will check their facebook page more than every hour of everyday!  The amount of time that people spend on this social network tool could be used to do something productive such as learn an instrument, actually hang out with friends in person, or do something active. 

Along with wasting peoples valuable time, facebook also gets a lot of people in trouble.  There are countless times where Ive seen people find their girlfriend or boyfriend with someone else in their facebook pictures and it always just causes a big fight. Many students will be on facebook during class and wont be paying attention to lectures, causing them to either have to cheat on tests or get poor grades, and probably the biggest trouble Ive seen facebook cause is when pictures from parties get posted. Ive even seen someone get suspended from school because he was at a party that wasn’t even school related but someone in the schools disciplinary department found out about it and it cost him a one week suspension. 

I do have a facebook account myself, but as time goes on and more and more applications are being added as well as more people joining the network that you dont want to be nosing around your personal life (ie parents or elementary kids) i really have stayed away from it.  ive seen it cause so many problems and just waste peoples time that i really dont want to become caught in it.  While facebook may be fun for a little while, it is not a productive use of time and causes more problems that good.  Dont let yourself be the next victim of this thief in the night.

“Location, location, location” every business wants the best and everybody knows that real estate prices reflects this desire.  But physical locations are not the only real estate that bow to this phenomenon.

Recently I was trying to buy a domain name, and after typing it into my web browser, I found that it was for sale.  When I inquired about the price it was $22,400.  After doing a little more research, I found this was nothing compared to some other domains such as usapa.com, which is currently listed at $195,800 on buydomains.com. 

It is shocking that 8 letters and a punctuation mark could cost so much, but it goes to show that even in the virtual world, where all one has to do to get to a store is type in a few letters, “location, location, location.”