"Facebook
Purpose
“Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.”
Description
Via a series of ‘Networks’ (affiliated via college/university, school, work and location) and ‘Groups’ (created by users) people can get in touch with old acquaintances, communicate with their current friends, or even make new ones. A variety of tools are incorporated into the system such as ‘Events’ which can be joined to show people where you are going, or ‘Notes’ to show them what you are thinking. Messaging occurs in both ‘Groups’ and ‘Events’ for the users involved and peer-to-peer messaging is done via private messages or public messages displayed on each users ‘Wall’. The ‘Mini-Feed’ allows other users to see your activity on the system, and a ‘News Feed’ displayed upon login shows you what your ‘Friends’ have been up to. To break the textual nature of many social networking tools, photos uploaded by users can be tagged by location (within the photo) to existing (or non-existing) users, so you can see the user to ensure that it is the person you think it is.
Ways of using this tool
Facebook is freely available to any user, who may participate in a majority of activities from the offset. However, the backbone of Facebook are the ‘Networks’ for colleges/universities, schools and workplaces for which membership must be authorised, usually by email domain (students must have an *@*.ox.ac.uk email address to join the Oxford University Network for example). The ability to create and join ‘Groups’ provides the facility for local and remote groups of students and researchers to remain in regular communication. It is now possible for ‘Banners’ to be posted to ‘Networks’ to display current information, such as the Oxford ‘Flyer’. Other methods of communication and information delivery are continually being developed in Facebook, including the ability to communicate with external web applications. Facebook’s importance (or potential importance) in the academic environment lies in its massive uptake by the undergraduate student population, a very high percentage of whom are users of the site. However, due to its infancy there is active debate as to current and future usage of Facebook by institutions.
Learn More
Facebook on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook Facebook, The Complete Biography (Yadav, S., 25/8/2006, Mashable) http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/About Facebook 85% of College Students use Facebook (Arrington, M. 7/9/2005) http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-studentsuse-facebook/
Access
You can access Facebook at http://www.facebook.com
This document is part of a larger set aimed at introducing the reader to a wide range of technologies. Please visit this web page for more information: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/crt/resources.xml
Your primary support for IT issues comes from your department or college. Your first port of call for questions and advice should always be your local IT support staff.
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