EDU 255 Week 4 Facebook

I chose Facebook to explore:

The target audience for facebook was Harvard-only in 2004, expanded to other schools and required a university email address.  In 2005, high school students, professionals, and then everyone had access and the site is still in existence.  I think it is popular because you do have to give people permission to view your site, but you can also visit portions of other people’s pages but ask to “friend” them.  It must be popular since there are links to facebook pages, movies about the origin of Facebook, and references to it in numerous places.  There is such a potential for connectivity to many other people.

I joined facebook to get a better idea of how it worked – started by sending “friend requests” to a few people (mainly family and a few high school friends).  I checked email 24 hours later and WOW - what happened?  All of a sudden people I haven’t seen in decades are sending information – I see many family members are already on the site and it seems there was a great social gathering going on since 2005 that I was unaware of – it is easy to sit and get “lost” in catching up with friends, family, previous students, previous teachers for hours.  Will I get any work done?  

I still don’t understand what exactly can be done on the site – but it has been really interesting.  It is amazing how many people you meet – especially in 24 years of teaching – but most of the pages I visited were high school friends and family.