In today’s age, there seems to be such a large desire to be able to communicate with anyone at the drop of a hat. With facebook taking over the younger generations, this leaves older folk wanting something for themselves. Of course why would they want something that merely serves as a form of communication though, when they can use so many facets of the internet to help them out.

This is where LinkedIn comes into play. This website is like other job search websites in that it is an easy way for employers to find employees, but it offers so much more. You are able to connect with others that you may know, and the more people you know, the more job opportunities are available to you. At the same time though, you are able to communicate in many of the same ways as are offered by facebook.

This is a much more practical social networking website for older generations, and I predict it will become much more commonly used in the near future.

I remember back in the day, when you wanted to go online, you clicked the little e  icon on your desktop. It’s been such a long time since I’ve used Internet Explorer to access websites I almost associate it with dial tones and extremely slow internet. Once fast internet was available to the masses, some people started to switch over to Mozilla Firefox. I personally fell in love with it and used it for a very long time. It was the first browser to incorporate tabbed browsing and add-ons that allowed you to customize your internet exploring experience to your liking. On top of this, it has excellent spyware and pop-up blocking abilities, and ran much faster than Internet Explorer. Eventually microsoft decided to fight back and came up with Internet Explorer 7, which finally incorporated tabbed browsing, but it still ran much slower than Firefox. Then, Apple redesigned their browser, Safari, and came out with claims of it being 2x faster than Internet Explorer and nearly 1.7x faster than Firefox. I tried it out, and it was! I loved the interface, the customization, and everything about safari. It loaded quicker than firefox, and took up less memory on my computer at the same time. It didn’t have all of the add-ons of firefox, but I loved the user interface so much more. Then google chrome came along….It is so fast. Like scary fast. It has everything that Firefox and Safari offer combined together into one clean package. Tabbed browsing has never been easier, and not only does it load pages quickly, but it opens up on my computer (which isn’t exactly fast) in no time at all. With all of these new browsers out there though, it leads me to question…what’s going to happen to Internet Explorer? Will Microsoft just simply cut it’s losses and move on? Or will it dump tons of money into a newer version that will most likely flop again like IE7. Anyone else have any ideas on the subject?

I am predicting that facebook, as it continues to grow, will begin to replace Twitter fully and completely. Since facebook has had status updates, it has one up on Twitter, in that you have a full profile and other forms of comunication along with your status updates. Especially now that facebok has added the new “comment” option to just about everything (including status updates) it has basically become the same thing as Twitter. I think that Twitter will eventually go under though, because facebook has so much more to offer. It’s a great idea and all, but unless Twitter does something soon to vamp up what they have to offer, I think Facebook will claim another victim in the world of the internet. Does anyone else have any other ideas?

In today’s world, music has become an essential part of nearly everyone’s daily life. People use it for entertainment, to keep them awake, to help them go to sleep, to relax, and even for motivation. Nearly everyone has an MP3 player, and a wide variety of their favorite songs on their computer, but what happens when you don’t have your computer with you, or you forgot your MP3 player at home? You could listen to an internet radio station…but who wants to do that? For most people it’s hard to narrow your music choices down to simply “alternative” or “pop” or “rock”. You could go to a site like youtube or www.playlist.com where you can individually choose the song (or music video) that you would like to listen to, but this becomes tiresome (especially if you don’t know what you want to listen to).

This is where Pandora comes in. Found at www.pandora.com, Pandora will ask to to register with an email address (which they never contact you at) and pick a band that you like. From there, their “music genome project” takes over and starts by playing you one song from that artist. You have the option to give the song either a thumbs up, or a thumbs down, and from there Pandora will pick your next songs that you are also able to rate. As time goes on, your “station” becomes more and more personalized based on your ratings, and you can even skip a limited number of songs or create multiple stations with different artists on each one! It is a great website, and I use it constantly (even on my own computer where I have my own music). Best of all, it’s 100% FREE! Check it out!

“Mary is now in a relation ship with John.”

“Jim and Cindy are engaged.”

“Ron and Ann have gone from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘it’s complicated’.”

Wow, how similar do those phrases sound to you? Even more, how many times have you found yourself saying (or thinking) what was said in the title of this post. Don’t get me wrong, it think it’s very convenient to be able to access people’s personal life at a moments notice, but I think facebook has taken a lot out of personal relationships.

Just the other day I heard a rumor that one of my friends had broken up with his girlfriend of 3 years, and rather than being a good friend and calling him or at least shooting him an email to find out if everything was alright, I checked facebook and left it at that. It actually made things more awkward the next time I saw him just because  he knew that I had found out about the breakup on facebook, and I knew that he knew this.  It made me avoid the topic of the two of them, rather than asking him how he was doing like a real friend should have.

At the same time, if your relationship is “complicated” I really don’t need to know about it. That’s your business, not the world’s. Facebook has allowed us to keep in touch in ways that people 10 years ago would not have even dreamed about, but I think it has gone a bit too far, or at least people take it too far, and we have reached a world where private relationships are barely even possible. How many of you are guilty of doing this? I know I am…