Spacedmonkey

This is the second part of series of posts about life at university and my thought on my first year. The first post in the series just had some general thoughts I had coming straight back from Portsmouth. This post is entitled “faceboking“.

As a student at university, prepare yourself to spend hours of your life on this web site. I have heard facebook discribed as, “Like crack”. If you walk around a computer room in any university campus, you will see many screen with this site on it. I know that I personally have spend hours, tagging myself in photos, search for friends and reading other people walls. But many do not understand this phenomenon. Why is facebook so good?

The site seems to understand that people want to know what their friends are doing and share information easily. The site was orignally designed for students and even now when it is open, it still has that at it’s core. It understand that MySpace is different market, that facebook users don’t care about what look of their profile and that not everyone in the world should be able to see your profile. So other people on your network can see your profile. Your network can be a workplace, region, high school or college. For example, I am member of London and Uni. Portsmouth ‘10. Only people that live in london or are currently going to Portsmouth. This is very useful and cuts down on spam friendship requests.

It is truly amazing how useful this site can be, but it can also make problems. For example, if you make a complete fool of yourself one night and say something not very nice. If someone takes a picture of you and tags, people that you would normally very see again maybe be able to find you. Also as everyone can see your relationship status, lots of people as you why have you not changed your profile to in a relationship. This is called making your relationship, “Facebook Official“.

Personally, even through there are bad things about facebook, I still love the site and will use it as long as everyone I know does. It really shows real people, you can really tell how popular someone is by the number of pictures they have been tagged in. This article on the BBC news site, seems to prove that people on facebook are more truthful and real.

If I was a new student to uni, I would get used to the site before going off to university so you can be a good facebooker. Learn that things written on the internet can be taken lots of ways. Don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to someone face. Understand that things write on people profile are public. Happy facebooking.