Facebook

This is Michael's blog on Facebook. Facebook, formerly Thefacebook, is a free-access social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people. People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. The website's name refers to the paper facebooks depicting members of a campus community that some US colleges and preparatory schools give to incoming students, faculty, and staff as a way to get to know other people on campus. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook while he was a student at Harvard University. Website membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide.Facebook has met with some controversy over the past few years. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. It is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.

Digital Identity

I possess an oyster card, meaning that the police have the means to track my voyages by public transport, the average person is recorded by CCTV 300 times a day, so, being an average person, I am recorded by CCTV quite often, again this is a means for the police to track me, I also possess a mobile phone, which can be tracked, and if need be, this information could be disclosed by 'Talk mobile' to the police, giving them another means of tracking me and, although my passport does not have an electronic flea, it is scanned every time I pass customs, providing the police with more information about me. That is the extent of my offline digital identity. If needs be, the police could easily track me down, possessing my address, my phone number etc... However, only the police and the government can possess and use this information, in a way this is reassuring, because it means that it is not easy, even scarcely possible, for any random individual to track me down. However, can we trust the police and government to keep this information?Is our modern society starting to mirror Orwell's dystopic society of 1984? Well in a way, yes, we are 'monitored' by CCTV cameras, oyster 'swipes' and other things. But in another way our society has not reached the extremes of Big Brother's society, we are allowed freedom of speech, freedom of thought and the police and government is not abusive of their knowledge of us, their power.

Microblogging

This is Michael's blog on Microblogging. Microblogging is a smaller, simpler and easier from of blogging. Sites such as Jaiku and Twitter use microblogging. Microblogging is basically a form of blog that gives an update of whatever the microblogger writes to those who follow whim or her. Importantly, it is accessible by portable handsets and mobile phones. For example, you can get a kind of RSS feed to your phone from whoever’s microblog you follow and it will give you live updates from them, just like sending a text. Facebook has a form of microblogging called ‘status updates’. Write something in your status and your friends will immediately see it if they are logged into Facebook, and you will see anything your friends write.Machines and computers can also microblog. For example, the Tower Bride Twitter simply has some computer linked up to its systems. It posts a sentence saying ‘opening for’ or ‘closing for’ whichever ship passed through, and then the time. The houseplant Twitter has a device that measures the water levels in the soil at regular intervals and then sends a post that either tells the % water in the soil or says ‘water me please’ if it drops below a certain level. The River Thames Twitter gets data about high and low tides from some other source and then puts it into a post saying ‘if you hurry, you’ll catch my next high/low tide which is at …’.Twitter and Jaiku are an alternative to Blogger for people who don’t want to receive extremely long posts and want to stay in touch with friends easily. As Jyri Engeström‘s slideshow said, ‘the future is here, its just not evenly distributed yet.

Twitters

This is Michael's blog on Twitters. A Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.
Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, or through applications such as TwitterMobile, Tweetie, Twinkle, Twitterrific, Feedalizr, Facebook, and Twidget, a widget application. Four gateway numbers are currently available for SMS: short codes for the United States, Canada, and India, and a United Kingdom-based number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email. By September 2008, Twitter had 'well over 5 million visitors.'
Twitter messages may be tagged using hashtags, a word or phrase prefixed with a #, such as #beer. These are evisently hugely useful!