My addiction to the internet

This past week of finals has been rough an tiring...and it took a lot of time out of leisure to study. So, with my busy schedule, I decided to deactivate my facebook account to buy myself some more time for studying. Good idea? Not really.

Day 1.
The first day I went off of facebook, I felt free. Free from communication, free from status updates, and free from the troubles of my friends. I actually liked being off of facebook. It provided me with a lot more time for studying and for myself to just enjoy the sweeter things in life.

Day 2.
I started to feel lonelier and more nosy. I found myself wondering what so and so was up to, and what they were thinking, what they looked like, if they put those pictures of that party up yet, etc...This derived my first thought. I feel that a deactivation of facebook results in an isolation from the rest of the world. You no longer feel like you have a place in the world. You no longer feel like people are curious about what you are doing or what you are about. With this, day 2 felt like I didn't have friends.

Day 3.
Day 3 started out fine. I actually had stuff I needed to take care of and so I didn't notice my deprivation of facebook like usual. However, it was mid day when one of my friends asked me what I've been up to. they had said I hadn't seen you in days. I thought to myself...I hadn't seen this girl for months! Then I realized that she was referring to facebook. At that point in time, I felt like I had a genuine attachment to the website. With this website I create presence. People knew what I was doing when I was doing it, and why.

Undeniably, facebook has become a social tool in our lives; much like cell phones, instant messenger, and emails. If you are not on facebook, you are a no body...I found this out the hard way.

One of the most fascinating things I discovered about this class was my addiction to facebook. Had it not been for this class, I probably wouldn't have given my usage a second thought. Now, I see that facebook can be very dangerous and a clear breech of privacy.

Its been a great semester. I've learn a lot about the technology used in the past, present and the future. I really enjoyed listening to professor ferguson's perspective on a more diligent theory on our consumption and use of technology.

Final Paper...part 1

So for my final paper, I'm choosing to write on the second topic where I will have to use Giles Slade's book, "Made to Break" to answer the following question: “With the recent rise of the environmental movement in this country, will America continue on the path of a disposable society described in Slade’s work or finally turn to the path of going green?” I choose this topic because I honestly think that it was a lot of substance to it. In today's day and age, we are evolving from a once wasteful society to a more 'go green' attitude. I feel that I can tie this movement in perfectly with Slade's work using ample sources from the media and latest technologies made today.

To answer the question without any research conducted thus far, I'm going to hypothesize that America is on a path of going green, and that Slade's vision of America as a disposable society is slowly deteriorating. Of course there will be debate and differences in my paper. I will undoubtedly find conflict in the financial and social interests of Americans when evaluating current society. But in terms of how Americans choose to live, and how necessary technology is to the individual; I will certainly find a lot of good juicy information with plenty of fuel to make this paper both interesting and enlightening to both myself and my reader.

I'll keep yall posted on the research...

The Facebook Effect Part 3

Kirkpatrick beings the third and final part of his book by discussing platforms. Platforms, as he describes opens facebook up to hundreds and thousands of programmers to develop their ideas into a UGI based library with tons of potential for all types of applications. Kirkpatrick mentions several of which that are actually used today including Causes, Chat, and photos. While he goes on to describe this unique aspect of facebook, what I really found interesting in the third part of the reading was his input on advertisement.
“It is merely a useful shorthand, as in the Sandberg sessions, to refer to a process in which companies spend money to get people more interested in their products.” (Kirkpatrick 245) In my opinion, facebook has a huge advantage in the advertising world. Usually, the case is that producers have to aim their advertisements to a certain group of consumers looking for a certain type of product. However, using facebook profiles, that list “activities” “interests” “movies” ”music” etc…facebook now has identified its users to producers. Generally speaking…producers no longer have to “shop” for their consumers or make their ads extensively broad, instead, they can gear their ads to a select group of individuals. For example, in my facebook profile, I listed tennis as one of my activities and interests. So, essentially a company such as tenniswarehouse could offer its ads to my margin as oppose to someone who has no interest in tennis at all! What is driving facebook’s powerful advertising dominancy is its gigantic user base. The problem with a lot of adware agencies is that it’s tough to get the attention of everyone! With billboards and newspaper ads, it’s more of a hit or miss kind of thing. But with facebook profiles, producers can now hit who they want to hit every time. The algorithm is similar to that Amazon’s in that it memorizes what users want to see and keeps feeding them with relevant or similar products; its actually quite revolutionizing from the paper coupon books, flyers, and other now primal ways to get people’s attention. (Kirkpatrick 264)
Not only are computers generating these specified ads, but also now users can specify exactly what they want to see. When you close one of the ads generated by the algorithm, it will ask you why you don’t want it: “You have removed this ad. Why didn't you like it? Uninteresting, Misleading, Offensive, Repetitive, Other.” I find it amazing that this is where the future of advertising is going, and I am very curious to see what it is going to look like in about ten years or less! As Dave Tapscott noted, “this is not about friendships, this is changing the way we orchestrate capabilities in society to innovate and to created goods and services.” (Kirkpatrick 265)

Facebook's News Feed

I always wondered how Facebook prioritizes your friends to the twenty or so that show up on your news feed once in a while. When logging into your account, Facebook automatically publishes the news of friends that are correctly relevant to your social life. I mean, lets face it, I'm not bffs with everyone of my 800+ friends, so how does facebook know which friends I'm actually interested in reading about?

I feel that Facebook's algorithm on the news feed is based off of two things. 1) the people who you stalk and 2) the people who stalk you. Admittedly, I am guilty of the occasional stalker personal. Like everyone else on facebook, I go throught the pictures, walls, and even now, friendships of people that I feel are worth stalking. While many people think that their stalkerish lifestyles are their own little secret, clearly, someone in working for facebook knows who you are looking at, and how many times your looking at them. There are applications on facebook (not legitimate or detail-based ones) but applications non the less that claim to tell you who is your stalker. These applications get 1000 hits daily simply because people want to know who is looking at them, and their everyday life. You know who has the real answer? Facebook!

So, how do you think the general people (i.e. all facebook users) feel about looking at random people's profiles now? Do you feel about look up that cute girl from highschool and ALL her pictures knowing that someone out there knows that you are looking at her profile every single day without a single facebook relationship other than just being friends? I know that I'm going to think twice next time I do so. I feel that the bottom line of this post is to say, stalk those who only want to be stalked; or rather, only look at people's profiles with no fear of getting caught. Who knows if one day, a hacker will break the algorithm and produce an application that shows your real top 10 stalkers with how many times they've seen your profile? Imagine gaining access to that app and number 1 is some dude you haven't talked to in years. I would feel totally and utterly violated. WATCH WHO YOU STALK BECAUSE ONE DAY THEY MIGHT FIND OUT!!!!

My curiosity found this site. the article is a great read on the dynamics of facebook's code.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-18/the-facebook-news-feed-how-it-works-the-10-biggest-secrets/

Aiming to Learn as We Do, a Machine Teaches Itself

Today, I presented my current events article from the NY times. My article was about NELL (the Never Ending Language Learning system), and how this super computer is breaking boundaries in terms of technology mastering semantics. It is actually quite superb when you read the article and see how amazing technology is getting these days. Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University developed NELL with intentions of bringing human language to the world of computers. NELL revolves its “knowledge base” around 290 semantic categories such as actors, universities, cities, sports teams, etc; and connects all of these categories through various “relations”. NELL currently has 280 relations and scans hundreds of thousands of textual patterns and phrases to match up categories based on their relations to other categories. I thought it was quite amazing how NELL was highly automated, meaning that it could perpetuate its own curiosity and have endless knowledge with the millions of web pages out there. With NELL’s progress, we can actually have a computer that teaches itself based on the knowledge that has already been established through human establishment. I might just be a little paranoid, but while reading the article, I couldn’t help thinking about sci-fi horror films with dangerous super computers. Some movies that came to mind were Eagle Eye, and of course, Terminator’s Skynet.

But jokes aside, I asked the class if it was safe for NELL to be basing its knowledge base off of something as bias as the world wide web? From our midterm project, we determined that there are sources out there (Wikipedia) that are just not reliable. So, what if NELL were to get false information from sites like Wikipedia? Could NELL be identified as a credible source of information? I feel that one solution to the problem could be that the same or similar algorithm could be used, but instead of using the WWW as reference, it could narrow its database to credible sources such as ESPN for sports, CNN for news, etc. I understand that its knowledge wouldn’t be as extensive, but it wouldn’t be so volatile to false information or bias entries.

All in all, NELL is a great idea with a ton of potential. It’s algorithm is shaky, but with work, I’m sure that its future is bright. With NELL in mind, I am curious to find out where the future of A.I. is going. We now have a computer that can think for itself, what’s next? Robots?!?!

The Facebook Effect Part 2

The second part to The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick was very interesting. Starting with chapter 5, Kirkpatrick details the impressive financial offers by wealthy venture capitalists of the west coast. The portrayal of the battle of loyalty between Accel and The Post was very intriguing and quite astonishing. (Kirkpatrick 116) I don’t really know too much about venture capitalism, but reading chapter 5 opened my eyes to how risky these people really are. For a company that was less than 2 years old to be getting offers in the millions was very very impressive. How did these venture capitalists know what they were getting themselves into? And how did they know that facebook was going to be so big? Companies usually take decades to build their capital up to the millions but facebook did it in such a short amount of time. Towards the end of chapter I read that Accel, being the bigger firm, eventually got the deal over The Post and valued facebook at 80 million.

I have already seen the movie The Social Network, and therefore know the brief history of Facebook. So, I find it really interesting when I find conflicting information, or information was wasn’t seeing in the theaters. In the movie, Zuckerberg is portrayed as a cocky intellectual with all the right answers with a fearless attitude. However, Kirkpatrick displays several points where Zuckerberg was scared and frightened – breaking down in tears. Kirkpatrick explains “he did agree to start seeing n executive coach to get lessons on how to be an effective leader.” (Kirkpatrick 164)

Zuckerberg eventually was receiving offers at 1.5 billion dollars. Even at this point, Zuckerberg refuse to even glance at these documents. What I find impressive about Zuckerberg, and account him tremendous success is his composure when it came to big business deals. He knew that the money was going to be coming, but he continued to focus his success on the opportunities, and not the money. I also found it cool how facebook was recruiting employees from established corporate giants. In fact, facebook was actually taking employees from other giant computer companies such as Amazon and Google. Of course this is when facebook was beginning to make a name for it, but I still found it extraordinary that in the public eye, facebook was beginning to make a good, long-term name for itself in terms of employment.

The Facebook Effect Part 1

David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect, describes the history of Facebook and its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick's book shares a very close representation of the movie, The Social Network. The book starts by introducing an interesting story about Oscar Morales and his opposition to FARC, a guerilla group of Colombian terrorist who take citizens and outstanding political figures to make their point more disturbing. Morales, an avid Facebook user used the site to create a group opposing the hostiles. To his (and my) surprise, the group attracted followers by the thousands in a very short amount of time. Soon enough, action was in store, and Morales organized a global march against the group with participants reaching to the millions. This one example exemplified the exquisite power of the social networking tool known as Facebook. Facebook was originally meant to just be social networking site has become a very powerful political tool. As Kirkpatrick stated, “Despite decades of fear and intimidation, Facebook gave Colombia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust.” (Pg. 5)

The author then goes on to describe the origins of the sites creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Describing him as a “geek”, Zuckerberg was also a genius. He was the graduate of a very prestigious high school and was highly involved with the innovation of highly intricate software. Before facebook, Zuckerberg had created several other forms of software that was very addictive and promoted loyalty among its users. The software use ranged from studying for an Art final to linking similar music together (much like Pandora.)

Kirkpatrick eventually got to the creation of thefacebook (pg. 27). This was obviously the star of Zuckerberg work as it was a collaboration of past social networking sites like Friendster and MySpace. Other creations of Zuckerberg included facemash and course match, all of which shared a similar algorithm with that of facebook. Many of his friends blamed the creation on his introverted personality (pg. 29)…as the Kirkpatrick states, “of you’re a geek who is a little uncomfortable relating to other people, why not create a website that makes it easier.”

What I find so interesting in this book, and in the movie, is Zuckerberg’s composure when it came to making expensive business decisions. As a college kid with little money, how can you deter advertising deals that are priced in the thousands or even millions!? As indicted on page 33, Zuckerberg wanted to keep the seriousness of facebook exclusive, while making it more fun than anything…