Social Networks Go to Work

In the article Social Networks Go to Work, Ellen Messmer who is the writer of the article shows how our lives involve a lot of social networking activities. People use social networking for both personal and business purposes. Social networking sites are many, like facebook, linkedin, youtube, people begin using them in business with the use of instant messaging, peer-to-peer file-sharing and media streaming.

Depending on the information provided by a survey from market research firm NewDiligence that had 527 respondents including IT managers and end users, the respondents who were using social-networking sites at work were 60% and 85% of them were using IM and media with streaming audio and video. More than half of respondents said that they use file-sharing for business purposes at their work, and one-third claimed that they use music and video sharing for personal purposes. About 40% of them were using personal internet-based telephony, and some of them were using online “anonymizer” system to secure their line.

The writer also talked about the security issue of these sites, she talked about the danger and the security of these sites that people are using them in their daily lives. These sites are becoming an easy way for attackers, as there are a lot of users who use them constantly. Malware, spam, and other viruses are example of these attacks. Around half of the respondents said that they use social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter at least once a day. “Any social media where you do have a lot of eyeballs is a direct distribution channel for malware.” Said jose Nazario, who is a network security researcher.

IT managers and professionals took a big step to provide a more secure networking environment by having some policies or communication plans to monitor their networks. The idea of enterprise started to seem much more secure in terms of having a network to serve the company needs.

A very good example of a company that uses social networking to spread out and be more and more famous is MuscleTech. It is a company that makes and produces bodybuilding supplements. Regardless of their continuous tweets on twitter, they often have posts of commercials to their products and how famous bodybuilders use them like Jay Cutler and Roney Coleman. What they do is that they share the videos that they have on youtube on their facebook fan page. Probably what they want to achieve is to make their company well known and get to the highest possible number of product selling.

To see what MuscleTech does in the social networking world, click on the following link: https://www.facebook.com/muscletech

Generation Next

After listening to the podcast “Generation Next”, we can see some similarities and differences between American’s and Iraqi’s youth. The new generation especially people between 18-24  are more engaged in politics as mentioned in the podcast, similarly Iraqi’s adults are focusing on politics more than the previous generations. Iraqi’s youth are more active and trying to catch up with the political and economical changes that happening around the world. They care more about political situation in Iraq and they want to make Iraq a free country and more democratic. It is a fact that Americans have been using technology for a long time before Iraqis like internet services and cell phones. But Iraqis youth also took advantages of the technology even though it was a new thing for them. They got benefit from social networking to share their ideas and keep their friendship strong. Iraqis youth, unlike Americans, are actively targeting the way their government is formed and how politics is going on after the chaos of 2003. 

They provide them internet services and some kinds of developed services like i-chat for video conferences. So, the young generation are able to talk to the politicians and people that they could not meet them. Through these services youths can ask politician whatever they want.