Facebook promotes privacy and representing real world networks in web environment

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Facebook promotes privacy and representing real world networks in web environment.
Facebook being a social network has become one of the major medium through which people are interacting socially. This is because it offers various features through which it facilitates internet socialization. Through Facebook, one is able to; share messages privately, photos, videos, songs, personal comments publicly and other forms of related expression. Facebook has been rated as the most visited website on the internet. This has lead to a drastic increase in its usage and membership. The main aim of Facebook as a community is for people to join and share their idea of an online community. (alexa 2008)
This research paper is a study on Facebook as a social web, critically looking at how it promotes socialization. There are other social websites eg My Space and Twitter but in this study, specifically this paper tries to analyze the design and features that encourage socialization through Facebook. Looking at the following formative questions then at the end of our discussion we shall be able to know-how Facebook as social network is said to be social, how dose it promote interactions with privacy between its users and lastly why it stands out as the best social web compared to other social networks. (Preece, 98).
Sociability can be described as the ability to create interactions with other people in the web. Facebook uses various structures to promote socialization within its network. It uses personalized profiles of individual users to encourage them to interact and blogging. Blog is a feature which is created to facilitate users to make comments on a particular topic. This creates socialization between the other readers and the author of the topic. Facebook is therefore seen as a people focused web since it uses personal information as a mean of interacting users. Each individual Facebook community member owns a home page. The content of the home page contains a profile page which has information about the individual user. Details of the user to be posted on the profile page depend on the user. This is mainly for security purposes and confidentiality. This has made Facebook as one of the most logged to social web (Preece, 92).
Facebook is described as a means through which the existing connections in the real world are taken and made available on the internet and accessed through the social network web. Facebook promotes a safe and private environment through which ones real identity and connection networks are presented in the internet. Therefore Facebook sociability can be described as an extension of a person`s identity or information and presentation of the information in an accessible way to the person one has added as friends. Occasionally privacy to personal Facebook accounts has been violated, and in particular the Beacon adverts scandal. Facebook has always encouraged sociability through creation of private, and a social environment known to all. This has been made possible through: use of a persons legal names; there is always a restricted access to personal profiles; meeting is purely through the web and customized accesses. (Preece, 88).
With the creation of Facebook and its inception on the web and being made available as a means to socializing, it caught the attention of many users with its mandatory use of real actual names by the users. This was found not to be normal because other webs that existed encouraged their users not to use their actual names but to have an alias name on their profile. All this was changed by Facebook. With this new development users were able to have an easy access to the database within Facebook with much ease just like one dose with a phone book. The use of actual names made searches more relevant compared to the users having to exchange their alias names. Use of the actual name in the Facebook also gives relationship between the traditional ways of socializing and the new methods which includes Facebook. This has increased the relevancy and the use of the web even among the older generation. Use of proper names promotes the element of legal ownership, safety and security. (Perez, 90)
Facebook is built on the principal of friendship where the user has to accept you as a friend, to be able to view another user`s profile. You must have permission from the user. This permission is given by accepting you as friend first. In sites like MySpace and Bebo profiles are viewed publicly. Facebook has an option of making its profile public but all this depends with the user in relation to the extent of privacy required. In relation to Beacon scandal Facebook was accused of improper handling of confi...