Blog Post Number 2

Slap in the Facebook:

It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up

Basically in this article, the author talks about how there are social networks all over the Internet that allow for the sharing of information from person to person or through various relationships. One of these websites that he cites is Facebook, which is a social network that allows for the passing of information through its network between members. The author found his problem with these social networks such as Facebook and MySpace when he noticed the information can only be passed through the members of the websites and the information is not accessible to each other. For example, a Facebook user cannot look up somebody’s profile or information on MySpace if they do not have an account and a user on MySpace cannot find out any information about a friend on Facebook if they don’t have a Facebook account. The author says that this is a problem because it does not create a free flow of information in the web and when you are putting information up that you want other people to see, you are creating a one-way street, in which only people in that network can see what you are doing/posting. The author poses an idea that there should be a social network that is universal throughout the web and allows you to access information no matter if you have an account or not. There are several websites that are being newly released that allow for this information to be passed through the Internet freely such as Pulse, which is released by Plaxo. The website will be limited at first until new ways are figured out to spread the features of these social networks across the Internet. The author also goes on to state that anybody can create a page similar to Facebook and make it better and more available to the public by using a variety of tools that are available to anybody. All in all, the author is asking for a website in which information can be passed freely through the internet and visible by people that want to search that information, no matter what website you may have or not have an account with or if you are just searching the web for an old friends information.

            The information is in a way linked to the new material we are covering in class about web page rankings and also the older material related to networks and friendships. In the beginning of the class, we learned about connections between nodes that formed a network and connections between nodes that connected two otherwise separated networks. In this article, the author talks about Facebook, which is a website that provides connections between people who belong to that network. These people or nodes can become friends with other people or nodes in the Facebook network by having similar friends or by just searching for people. However, this information is limited and the nodes or people in the Facebook network cannot link or become friends with anybody else in other networks such as MySpace. Therefore, separated networks cannot be connected because the information cannot be transferred through the social networks. In the new network that the author is talking about where there are no barriers placed on the network, information can be searched no matter if you are a member of the website, what website you are a member of, or if you are just searching information about a person. This means that these people or nodes can be connected no matter what through this network.

            Some newer material that we are learning now has to do with web page ranking and using hub pages to decide what are the best sources in searches. If this network could be made where the information that is put into this social network could be seen anywhere, then this website would be the highest ranked social network in front of other networks such as MySpace or Facebook because according to the author of the article, it would appear in all the search engines when you search for information on a person if they happened to post anything about themselves on any of these websites.