HOMEWORK: Social Networking

Socail Networking is all about communities and has various forms, including:

Q&A: The best example is Yahoo Answers, users can post any, literally any questions and award points to the best rated answer, of course people can rate and answer any open questions and read solved questions. Sometimes you get a very sophisticated answer in great detail and sometimes little wonderful tricks.
Social bookmarking: Save and categorize favorite/ interesting websites(blog, reviews, articles, recipes, online store...) and share with others, people can rate the bookmarks and get access to their own with any computer. Benefits: You can learn by any form of participation: ask, answer or simply just browse, and the best thing is it's FREE. You can ask embarrassed, stupid sensitive or personal questions which you might not ask in real life and get Practical-human experiences answers.

Social shopping: It's like a personal shopper, share your wish/shopping list and products review, drag others favorite items to be your own, and mix and match outfits before buying, it's easy to navigate specified products such is import grocery or wedding dress, the site allows users to search by keywords tags or by favorite seller. Benefits: Consumers have much more buyer power, we don't just get product info from ads and word of mouth anymore; we can reach more consumers and share our thoughts of specific products which are real, authentic, sincere and much more reliable. On the other hand, consumers can also reach small vendors (those that sell awesome product and don't spend on ads) all around the world, the raise of buyer power also raise the quality of product.

For the 2 examples of social networking above, I see no dark sides, both are all-around beneficial. My forecast of these new media technologies is that soon they will try to merge user names in various sites into 1, so people only have 1 uswe name for facebook, myspace, delicious, youtube and wiki. I think this is a good idea because it is a step closer to the reality, we have only 1 name and it's the same pereson anywhere you search, people tend to be more responsible to what they say when they know that people are aware of who they are. Also I think that mobile technolgy will grow very fast to suit people's desire of getting connected at anytime, not just for checking emails and web browser, phones that can not twitter or facebook will soon be gone as all generations are getting involve much more often.