Tutorial Six

I chose to look at Facebook for my online community. The address for Facebook is www.facebook.com

The focus of this community is to connect you to your friends so that you can keep up to date with their news, look at videos and photos and also send instant messages. Facebook is known as a social networking website.

Facebook allows you to customise your profile, giving you the option to change your privacy settings as well as choose who you become friends with. People can contribute by posting status updates, posting on friends walls (depending on privacy) viewing friends photos and videos (depending on privacy) as well as sharing their own. Also adding and accepting friend requests.

People choose to connect to facebook because it is an easy way to stay in touch with others. Another reason people connect is to 'follow the trends' many people have a facebook account so it is often talked about and used by poeple everyday.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-Animal-Cruelty/226907368706?ref=search
This is an example of a topic that is discussed on facebook.

Ethical issues that are involved in facebook are that it is possible to steal someones identity without them knowing. It is also possible to upload photos and videos containing people who don't know about it.

Advantages of using facebook are that you do not need to be in the same city or even country to keep in touch. You can send messages and comments at different times and still receive and continue them. Also you can have a vast number of friends all contributing to posts.

Facebook also has disadvantages over other communities such as you cannot talk to people face to face or hear their voice, making it less personal. Also spelling, abbreviations and grammar can make posts hard to decipher and cause confusion that talking face to face or over the phone would not.