Coil 1

Garrett Coil

Professor Dean Leonard

ENG.1101

28 Sept. 2018

Facebook Evaluation

Facebook has been a hit on social media and social networking sites since its beginning in 2004. The

founder of Facebook was hoping to help their fellow classmates at Harvard University to connect with each

other. Within twenty-four hours 1,200 had created a profile for themselves. It was so popular they extended it to

other Boston universities. They opened it to other Ivy League schools and from there to the rest of the

universities in the United States. In 2006 Facebook extended it to reach beyond just the universities and began

to allow anyone thirteen years of age or older with an e-mail to have a profile. It’s amazing to see how it started

with seemingly a good number of students to now see Facebook in almost every country around the world and

millions of people having profiles for free.

To get started on Facebook, it will ask the user to create a profile using an e-mail address. To set up a

profile, Facebook will ask for: a name, a birthday, a phone number, work experiences, education, places the

users live, family members, the relationships you have been in, likes and dislikes, and general information.

After filling all of these in, a profile can be seen on social media. This will help you get connected. If you

choose to, you can add a picture to your profile.

Facebook makes it easy to fill in all the necessary criteria it asks for. It puts it into categories which also

makes it easy to find the information people would look for. Facebook tries to suggest friends and family

members that you might not know was on Facebook. Facebook will also suggest people who could be a friend

for you based on similar likes. A feature Facebook has is to share photos with friends and family is a benefit
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that Facebook allows the user to do. Friends and family can leave good or bad comments on those photos that

are posted. The user can choose to share with friends only or go public with the photos.

Checking into places that the users is at and events postings is a good way for people to see what is

happening in one’s life and fun things they may want to attend. In this way Facebook can help grow an event. It

also helps the event creators to be prepared for how many people may be attending. A positive thing to

following an event is the user will receive notifications for instance: directions, time, day and cost for the event

if there is one, a reminder will appear a few days before and one on the day of the event. A list of people who

will attend the event will appear for those to look at.

Recently Facebook has added the go live feature. This feature allows people to watch an event when

they cannot physically be there. Going live for a business will show customers things they are looking for and

may give them a reason to patronize that business. Going live for an individual is a great way for sharing events

for friends and family that cannot be there. One bad thing that Facebook has not addressed is people can use

language that’s not appropriate. Some video may not be appropriate either, but it has figured out if there’s a

copywrite on music used in the video it will mute the live event.

When using a business Facebook page, the business has the option to allow people to post to their page.

The safest way for the business to allow posts without worry about a negative comment being wrote that can

hurt their business is to manage the settings in which the editor looks at the post before it can appear on that

site.

For all the good that Facebook does to keep people connected it has its bad side. They see asking for all

the criteria as a good thing, it doesn’t have enough protection for the user against hackers. If the profile is

hacked, a lot of the important information is on your profile that the hacker could use to steal your identity.

Another scary thing about Facebook is its ability to use facial recognition. In the beginning of Facebook, one

would need to tag a friend or family member in a post. Now Facebook, by using facial recognition knows who

they are already.

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I guess one thing that can be questioned is does everyone need to be so connected. People are constantly

checking their Facebook page. They check it when they wake up, before they go to bed, when they are eating

and many other times throughout the day. People set a notification to know when someone posts to their page.

People cannot help but to stop what they are doing to look once they hear that ding.

In my opinion, Facebook does a good job at keeping family and friends connected with each other.

Something that needs to be asked is: how much information should we allow ourselves to have on the internet. I

think Facebook asks for too much information that’s not needed to keep people connected.