A high school cheerleader in Mississippi is the latest victim of prying authority figures trying to delve into people’s personal lives via social networking sites. The girl handed over her login and password on request from her coach and teacher, presumably to find evidence of drinking or drug use. Instead, the teacher found a heated discussion of internal cheerleading politics and passed the information around to other school administrators. According to the lawsuit that followed, the student was then “publicly reprimanded, punished, and humiliated.” She’s getting legal help from the Student Press Law Center, and I hope they find some solid legal footing to stand on. The rest of us, take note: Your login information to any social networking site is yours and yours alone.
As Facebook grows as a website one can learn the new features such as pending friend requests. This amazing feature is able to give users an opportunity to request friends and to also remind people to be a friend. Another aspect of this feature is that it helps users keep track of the people that they requested as friends. Sometimes people need to see and oftentimes forget who they have requested as friends. This feature is also great for canceling friends that one can decide not to have requested in the first place. By being able to see and keep track of friend requests not only helps the user to be able to teach more about the features of Facebook but it gives a person a chance to understand more about the website. With each new technological advance on Facebook not only helps the user but it gives the user more of a capability to gain friends, and associate’s on the website.
This recently new application not only gives people more free reign but helps a person to be able to do what they want in terms of gathering people into their network community. By gathering more people into a network community a person is able to gain more and more contacts. With each new contact a person can not only gain their friendship but can also gain a new acquaintance. Some of the most amazing things about Facebook as a website are the special features such as this application that not only give a person a better sense of how to gain friends but help a person to continue or cancel a friend request.
As time goes on a person can be able to do more and more things on Facebook. Hopefully, people will enjoy this new feature that was added.
Markup Languages are the ways of creating and formatting content on the Internet. From the introduction of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), markup languages gained more popularity as they were easy to learn and simple to use.
When Facebook Platform was introduced for the development community, the markup language was released to ease the developer effort for creating Facebook applications. This way, third party individuals and companies could write applications that are compatible with Facebook Platforms. In addition to the Facebook applications, Facebook users can customize the profile page using the markup language.
If you are familiar with HTML, then you can easily learn Facebook Markup Language. Facebook Markup Language is a variant of HTML which consists of slightly different tags. These tags are specific to Facebook and they do different kinds of formatting in Facebook applications and pages.
If you have ever visited MySpace, then you know what is meant by customizing profiles. Compared to MySpace, Facebook is cautious about the content displayed on the site and the look and feel. Therefore, users can never customize a profile page similar to MySpace on Facebook because Markup Language does not support the customization up to that extent.
Facebook allows users to perform many actions as they do in real life scenarios. Facebook Gifts are one of the frequently used and popular features among the Facebook users, especially among the young crowd. Introduced in February 2007, Facebook Gifts allowed users to send gifts, small icons of different items designed by Susan Kare, who formerly worked at Apple.
Facebook came up with the concept of Virtual Gift Shop for hosting these various gifts that can be sent in a few clicks to the recipients. There are two main ways of sending a gift to someone; private and public. When gifts are sent through the private channel, the gift or the associated message cannot be viewed by anyone other than the sender and the recipient. When the gift is sent via public channel, everyone in the friends list can view the gift and the associated message.
Facebook users were given one free gift upon the registration and charged $1.00 per additional gifts. Initially the profit earned by the gifts was donated to Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity. But later at a point, the donation was stopped, and Facebook started releasing a new gift each day. These new gifts were limited (number and times limited) in an attempt to make the gifts rare among the users.
Although Facebook Gifts charges the users for sending gifts, Free Gifts, the application developed by Zachary Allia, allows users to send gifts to friends without spending any money. The latter feature since then, won the hearts of Facebook users, limiting the use of the original Facebook Gifts.
Instant Messaging or in other words IM has been there on the Internet for many years and we are familiar with many chat programs available as standalone applications and web applets. Embedding chat functionality in to a web page is no alien to the world of Internet. When Facebook introduced chat feature for the first time, it received a massive response from the Facebook users as Facebook introduced the chat function as a simple, yet effective service.
When you are online in Facebook, you will notice that chat application is running on the Facebook taskbar at the right bottom of the page. Whenever your friends come to Facebook and available for chat, the number which indicates the number of online friends increases. Then you can simply open the chat application and start chatting with your friends.
Facebook chat works similar to any other chat program with more or less the same features such as emoticons etc. Although many features of Facebook chat functions are similar to other chat programs, there are significant differences in the implementation of the program. As an example, while many other chat accounts can be integrated in to a desktop chat client such as Pidgin, Facebook does not allow to access Facebook chat through a third party chat client.
You can control all related parameters for Facebook chat by simply clicking ‘Settings’ in the main chat window. If frequent messages from your friends grab a lot of attention from you, you can go offline, so they cannot see you or message you while you are busy.
Have you ever heard of the concept of social networking? If you haven’t, it simply means an Internet platform for you and your friends to hang out and share ideas and content with minimum restrictions. When it comes to the target audience, there are no restrictions. As long as you portray a legitimate profile within the conditions laid out by Facebook Inc., the founders of Facebook, you can connect to as many individuals in the world.
Although Facebook started off as a social networking platform for individuals, now it has been enhanced to serve the corporations as well. In addition to that, now users can post their ads by simply paying Facebook a price per click.
By now, Facebook has become the most popular social networking site on the Internet with a user base of 150 million users around the globe. Facebook Inc. uses heavy infrastructure for catering the growing user demands and it has been successful so far.
With the large volume of users, Facebook encounters various issues that are specific for websites that are famous and has a large user base. Security or rather privacy of the information is one of the prominent issues that the Facebook team constantly works on.
Facebook is one of the first Web 2.0 applications made available to the Internet, making it attractive to many segments of Internet users. Since the inceptions, this social networking platform has introduced many revolutionary concepts in to Web 2.0 including many of user created applications.
Facebook advertizing is the perfect example for using Facebook’s unique news feeds for business purposes. The companies and brands can establish themselves in Facebook and they can promote the products and services through paid advertizing. If one of your friends does something with these brands or companies, the action will be notified to you through the news feeds. This notification is similar to what you get when one of your friends comment on some other friend’s photo.
There are two versions of Facebook Ads; Facebook Ad and Social Ad. Facebook Ad is a way for a company or a brand to start promoting their products and services. These ads do not have social actions although they can be linked to a Facebook page, external website, or an application. Although the Facebook ad itself does not have any social actions, the page linked to the ad does.
A social ad is an advertisement which contains social events and made popular among the friends of the advertiser. The advertiser and the friends interact using the social events, social actions such as writing on the wall or commenting on a photograph.
Facebook has its own guidelines for advertising. If you are interested in advertizing with Facebook, first step is to read their Advertising Guidelines which explains the rules and regulations of advertising with Facebook.
Facebook advertisements are kept small in size in an attempt to make it a non-distraction for the users. As a result, the title of the advertisement is limited to 25 characters and the body length is limited to 135 characters.
