Here is a video I found called "25 things I hate about facebook." I thought it was fairly entertaining and did a good job of covering the main things about facebook that drives people nuts. Or at least I agree with almost everything on his list and have many friends who have expressed the same frustrations. Julian Smith (the guy in this video) does say that he likes facebook there are just some aspects of it that are annoying.

This got me thinking. I too think facebook is a good thing and enjoy the benefits that come with it. I believe just by the mere popularity of it that there are thousands of other people who also really enjoy it. For something that is so well liked there sure is a lot of complaining about it? it's interesting how whenever there is something that has acquired so much attention there is just as much negative as there is positive. It all depends on how you look at it.

Update

The GNH Index has been updated here is the link again so you can look at it yourself. But if you are lazy I will tell you that the Nations happiness plummeted the Monday after the Health Care bill passed. The positive levels are below zero.

Gross National Happiness

I recently found this application for facebook, it's called the Gross National Happiness Index I have seen many of my friends on facebook use a counter to calculate the words they most use. Apparently this is now being done on a larger level evaluating all users of facebook to distinguish the levels of happiness in a country.

By counting the positive and negative words used in status updates they can generate a percent of happiness and compare it to specific days. Not surprising, in general positive attitudes drop significantly on Mondays and peak on the weekends. Holidays also tend to shoot up in positive statuses as well as have the greatest drops in negative statuses. Maybe it is just my sociological mind but I find these graphs very interesting to see and then try figure out why they look the way they do.

I first discovered this application when I came across this article about Australia's happiness index. In the article it refers to the "sorry day...That was the day Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered an apology to indigenous Australians." I then was curious at what the GNH index for the United States was when the Health Care bill passed. Unfortunately the graph currently only goes until 1:00 AM Sunday Morning before the debate had even started. I don't know about you but I will be checking back in a couple days to see the results. I'll post them when I find out.

Are you friends with your parents on facebook?

It may just be me but I really enjoy studying people and just observing their behaviors. The transition to parents joining facebook and the uproar it has caused has been very amusing to observe. I wondered to myself why is it that big of a deal? Until I thought about how I would feel if my parents had joined facebook.

I personally did not get a facebook account until I moved out of the house because my mom was so against the idea of any social networking site. She thought they were of the devil, this may be a little extreme but it's the best way I can come up with to express what she thought. Since then I have slowly been trying to show here the benefits of facebook and help her see that change isn't always that bad. It's been working. She has not yet joined facebook but I am constantly having to relay messages for her through it or I will get on with her every once in a while to give her updates of family members and good friends. I feel victorious in convincing her that it's not that bad but I still wonder how I would feel if she actually joined.

Honestly I have nothing to hide so I guess I wouldn't mind too much it's just a weird thing to think about. In this article about the petitions to keep parents from joining facebook Taylor is quoted, I would have to agree with him.
"People shouldn't be putting anything inappropriate on Facebook anyway," Taylor said. "Why would you want what you're doing in public? It'll come back to haunt you in some way or another."

Even if you don't have inappropriate thing posted there could still be times where older adults and parents really should just avoid it but then again we wouldn't have awkward funny stories to tell check out this website where you can post your own experiences with your parents on facebook, some of them are almost painful but hilarious

Pointless yet entertaining

In my search of things to blog about this week I found a lot of different articles about lawsuits, rapes, facebook climbing in popularity, more businesses jumping on the bandwagon, etc. There were some interesting and appalling things that I could mention but a lot of it seemed negative and I was sick of it. I know there are bad things but facebook also has many benefits. I did come across this article, it made me laugh and reflect on all the pointless things that take place on facebook. I believe many people see them as such but yet we all participate for one reason or another.

This particular article (which I mentioned above) is about the fan page "MY SISTER SAID IF I GET ONE MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON." I remember seeing this and thinking it was kind of dumb and there is no way that was going to happen but apparently they got the fans. Who knows if it is real but I sure did find entertainment in the idea and the fact that it has generated so much attention. I then thought about the other fan pages I have either seen or personally joined which were based on this same idea of looking for a specific number of fans. Did they reach their goal? In case you were curious here are the stats of the couple that I did join...

"I bet BYU fans can get 1,000,000 fans before Utah can!"

BYU Fans = 73,035
U of U fans = 68,127

I think BYU is winning, although we both still have a ways to go.
I love how Utah state and Weber had to join in on this as well

Utah State fans = 17,818
Weber fans = 3,798 (funny thing about this one though is they bet they could get 78 fans before BYU or Utah could get 1,000,000. I think they won!)

I know the rest of you may not care about this one but I have to keep up a little bit of my high school pride between us, Bingham, and our biggest rival, Alta there was a bet to see who could get 1,000 fans first. Apparently Bingham got their fans first but Alta got them faster. Here are the currents stats.

Bingham = 3,027
Alta = 2,529

This is all pointless right? it really doesn't mean anything but yet even the most down to earth person can get caught up in it.

Random facts about Facebook

1. The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product produced by a prep school Phillips Exeter Academy which for decades published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the "face book"

2. The very beginnings of facebook started when Mark Zuckerberg had just been dumped by a girl and needed a way to get her out of his mind. Here is what he wrote on his personal blog that night.

"I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 p.m. and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland [dorm] facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive."

He ended up hacking the Harvard server to get pictures of students to post on line and created Harvard's own "Hot or Not" (to read more of this story read the history of facebook on Wikipedia)

3. Facebook has officially been around since September of 2006

4. It currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide

5. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria, China, Vietnam,and Iran.

6. With that said 70% of facebook users are outside the United States

7. In December 2009 the New Oxford American Dictionary declared their word of the year to be the verb "unfriend"

8. In 2009 it was named the most popular Social networking site with MySpace following.

9. How about this for a little shocker. In December of 2008 the Supreme Court of Australia ruled that a summons posted on Facebook is legally binding.

10. The average user spends more than 55min. per day on facebook

11. In March of 2008 facebook had over 500 full-time employees and was worth $15 billion and is still growing.

12. over 500,000 applications on the facebook platform

13. Those who use facebook Mobile are 50% more active than non-mobile users

14. Facebook is translated into 70 different languages

15. More than 2.5 billion pictures are uploaded each month


For more random facts and also where I got my iformation visit facebook statistics
Random Facts webupon and Wikipedia

What do you find when you google your name?

Today is the day I am supposed to post something to this blog but I had no ideas of what I wanted to discuss. I could have done anything about why facebook is so great or why it is terrible or ....I just had an idea for next week possibly the irony of why the older generations being so against but recently I have seen many of them jumping on the bandwagon, hmmm I'll think about it. Back to today's post, I wanted something interesting but due to a long distracting week I hadn't even payed attention to the recent events outside of my little world. My solution, I Googled "facebook" and found this news story titled "Why tons of Facebook pages will wind up in Google search" It perked my interest because I once googled my name and my facebook page popped up. That kind of bothered me to know that even though you could only see some information my profile was available to to any random person anywhere in the world who uses Google (the biggest search engine).

It was time to read on so at least I could find comfort or have a legitimate reason to be infuriated as to why google had access to individual facebook pages. Here is google's answer:

"Search is a natural starting point for discovering the world's information," Google reps wrote in a 2009 post introducing real-time search, "and we strive to bring you the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content."

Basically there are many businesses, musicians, celebrities, etc. who use facebook as a way to connect with customers, or fans. For their benefit their pages need to come up in a google search. This makes sense and in fact sounds very beneficial, a quick status update or skimming thorough pictures could give someone all the information they need to potentially bring in more business.

They did mention that private profiles are safe but I was still skeptical because I had seen my page pop up before in a search. I was pretty sure I had since increased my security settings but I had to know for sure. First result: linkedin (that's fine I want people to find that one) Second: twitter (I guess that is okay because I only use that for this class, no personal info) and then there it was the third result. a little bothered I decided to click on it so I might be able to find a way to make sure it doesn't show up again. What do you know there is another girl with my exact same name! I've only heard of a few other Sereens but they all spell it different, not only does this girl spell her name the same but she has the same last name! What a blow to my ego, I thought I was the one and only. Oh well...I wish I knew her then we could be friends.

Facebook, Twitter, or the new Google Buzz?

It seemed to have all started with what is called "My Space." Now there are all kinds of sites used for social networking. The most popular being facebook and twitter. What about this new trend by Google? It's all the "buzz." In this age of technology we're always looking for new ways to get connected and when something new is introduced it spreads quickly with everyone trying to get in with the new trend.

Google Buzz appears to be a combination of all the other social networking tools combined, managed through your gmail account. From a users perspective here are some pros and cons to google buzz.

The pros: it will allow you to connect with many other sites including twitter and facebook to feed into the buzz, this means when you update your status somewhere else it will post it there for your buzz friends to see. You can stay connected with all of your closest friends whom you have taken time to get their email addresses without the junk from people you can barely remember who they are. It lends itself more to having actual conversation with many different people, where the other sites are usually used for short updates and occasionally individual conversations.

Some cons: how well is it actually going to catch on when we are already so used to using the other social networking sites? it would take work to start using the buzz to our advantage. With facebook making it so easy to find friends and still send messages like you would an email it takes away the need to get email addresses of your friends which is who you would want to follow and be connected with in the buzz.

Personally I have not yet found it worth my time to really utilize it other than to comment on posts of my two friends who do use it. Who knows maybe one day it really will catch on and will become something many people can't live without. Google has a way of sneaking in and taking over.

Are you a Stalker?

Is stalking someone on facebook a bad thing? sounds kind of creepy and I'm sure most of us cringe at the idea. But think about it, haven't we all done it at least once? When we have a date with someone you don't know very well, or even if you meet someone in a class that you think is cute, you're talking to a friend and want to know who they are talking about, there are lots of different reasons we come up with to stalk someone we're not yet friends with. While it sounds weird there really are times where it's helpful to get to know someone. If someone puts their information on the internet they have given authorization for others to view it.

I'm not going to lie but when I see that one of my facebook friends comments on a picture of me from a while ago I get this unnerving feeling. Not that I mind because they are my friends and like I said I authorized them to view the content in my profile. It's just weird to think people randomly go through all of my pictures, I do it to others so who am I to complain? Stalking whether it is of people you don't know or are already friends with is an interesting concept. It's totally okay until you realize other people could be doing it to you then it sounds creepy.

The Possibilities are Endless

I may have said last week in my post that I hate when people depend on facebook for their personal relationships but I do love how it makes it easier to keep in contact with people that live a long distance away. I could probably make a pretty good list of the things I and just about everyone else like about facebook whether it's something I like using it for or not. In reading some classmates' blogs I realized there are more benefits to using facebook than I had originally thought. There is a culture that has always been intriguing to me but yet so foreign. This week I learned from reading the blog of a class mate of mine who is deaf that technology is very helpful and even essential in helping them communicate with the hearing and even to locate others who are deaf. It got me thinking about how incredible the technology we have to allow for people across different cultures to communicate and connect with others of like interests. I might be close minded but when I think of the different uses of facebook it's limited to my little world of family and friends, all in the U.S., typically middle class, English speaking. I've always wanted to travel the world and see what there is to discover in so many different countries. What I often forget is that there are many different cultures and different lives being lived right under my nose. This takes place in my own home, neighborhoods, classes, etc. There is so much to learn and discover. Having networks such as facebook allows countless possibilities and connections with people living a different culture to share their personal experiences.

Divorce over Facebook

Normally I am pretty even tempered and was going to start my first post with all of my general impressions of facebook (the good and the bad), then I came across a lot of articles about divorce on facebook. I thought to myself, "why not post something a little more extreme to catch the readers attention from the start?"
Before I myself joined facebook I had heard many stories of the drama that goes on in a relationship because of a comment or status change that is posted for many people to see. In all of these cases though it was just a dating relationship, heart breaking but not devastating. I am just recently getting to a stage where a majority of my friends are married so I have not yet witnessed marriages being broken up either because of or even through facebook. Frankly I had never thought about it I assumed that was a private and sensitive enough thing that most people would not discuss it over a public domain. Apparently I was wrong. Google "facebook divorce" and you will find 12,900,000 results. A majority of these results are articles and research on the new cause of divorce, Facebook. Whether or not it is a cause or just an outlet to easier track whether your spouse is cheating or not could be debated. I would argue that it could be both. With the social network so easy and free as facebook makes it there are most likely some people who are not as committed to their marriage as they would otherwise be because it's easy to have another relationship. In many cases though it might actually save a bad relationship from going on longer when people so freely discuss their personal life and relationships, even if the relationship is an affair. I personally think it is tactless and immature to handle relationships over facebook especially your marriage. Get a little courage and talk face to face, so many problems could be solved or even avoided if we took time to really understand someone and keep our personal life just that, personal. It's too easy to publish words that you might actually be thinking but don't actually mean.