Do Employers Look at Facebook?

    One thing that I've always been curious about is whether or not Employers look at your Facebook and whether or not it plays a part in determining if you get that job.

    I found an article on CBS's website that says that many employers are beginning to look at social networking site to look at their potential employees and to decided whether or not to hire them. The article I read mainly focuses on Tim DeMello who owns an online company Ziggs and how he does Internet searches for all of his potential employees. I really like one quote from the article, DeMello says that "they come in all buttoned up, their clothing is meticulous, they spend years building this resume, and this person that's sitting there is almost entirely different than the person posting on these Web sites."He is saying that in an interview, you only see one version of a person, but when you look at them online you see a whole different side of them, which might not be the kind of person you want working for you. DeMello stresses that what you put online will stay with you forever. So just be very careful of what you make available to social networking sites, because it will follow you long after you have left college.

    I think that as college students this issue can really effect us because in a few short years we will be searching for jobs, and we don't want pictures on Facebook to effect the outcome of getting that job. I know that college is not only about receiving an education, but also about having fun. But there comes a point where you have too much fun, and then someone takes a picture and posts it, and then your life could possibly be effected forever. The lesson to be learned here is to be careful about what you put online, because you never know when it will come back to haunt you.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/20/eveningnews/main1734920.shtml

Why Do We Use Facebook?

When I was trying to think of something to write for this post, I asked myself a question that I'm not sure many other people ask themselves: Why do we use Facebook?

Now I know why I use it, to communicate with my friends and family and to keep up to date on things that are going on with my friends, but I also realized that I use it alot of the time just because I'm bored or I'm procrastinating on homework, or because I just feel like I should be on facebook.

I googled the sentence "why do people use Facebook?" and I found an article that was talking about a study conducted at the University of Missouri about how people use Facebook. Kevin Wise, a professor at the University designed a study that would actually allow him to see how his test subjects were using Facebook, instead of having the test subjects tell them how they use the social networking site daily. He found that people use Facebook for mainly two things: Social Browsing and Social Searching

He defined social browsing as "navigating the site without a targeted goal in mind" and defined social searching as "searching the social networking site with the goal of finding certain information about a specific person, group, or event." The results of his study showed that most people spend their time social searching, but then it often leads to social browsing

As a Facebook user, in my opinion I think that these findings are extremely true. A lot of the time I get on Facebook for a specific purpose, to look at someones status of pictures, but then I often end up spending way to much time going from page to page without a purpose or reason, which means that I transition from a searcher to a browser without even realizing it.

This study really interested me because it accurately explained why so many people end up spending so much time on Facebook without meaning too. And I think that if you sort of analyze your Facebook use habits, you will find that this study most likely applies to you too.

http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/04/26/how-people-use-facebook/13162.html

History

So I'm sure that most all of us have a Facebook and use Facebook. But I had never really thought about the history behind Facebook. I know that they have made the movie The Social Network that showed the story behind the creator of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, but I haven't seen it so I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of Facebook
Facebook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg who was a student at Harvard. But before he created the computer programming for Facebook, he created something else that ended up getting him in trouble at Harvard. He created a site called Facemash in 2003 for Harvard Students, which was almost like a hotness raiting site that compared 2 pictures of students and allowed the person to pick which one was hotter. To create this he had to hack into the server and copy the id's of all the students, and the site only lasted a few days before it was shut down by the Harvard Administration and Zuckerberg was charged with several serious charges that were later dropped.
After this site was shut down, Zuckerberg created a new site called thefacebook.com and was quickly accused by some by his freinds that Zuckerberg used their ideas about creating a social network for Harvard stuents when he created thefacebook.com, but the lawsuit was later settled. At first it was only available to Harvard students, and then it moved to Standford, Columbia, and Yale, and then eventually moved to most colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada.
Facebook really took off in the summer of 2004 when it appointed Sean Parker as its president and moved to Palo Alto, California.
After a year of just being available to college students, Facebook launched a high school version in 2005 and has now spread across the world and has become what it is today