The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast several of the free forums that have recently become popular with Internet users to establish their own informal or formal Web identities. The three I will compare are Facebook, MySpace.com and Yahoo 360. These hosting sites are designed to allow a person without technical background to be able to find other Web users with their same interests, find old friends and co-workers, to start a blog, assemble a group of friends in whatever manner they find convenient, join an existing group sharing a particular interest, etc. Pictures may be posted to share with friends and a variety of other activies exists.
In addition, these sites can provide a free forum for making business contacts and to drum up product sales, partner with other business persons, etc. So using them for commercial gain is certainly possible as well as the more typical informal use.
Along with these wonderful capabilities, these forums do present a new medium for fraud, harassment and Internet preditors. Other problem areas include loss of privacy, the tarnishing of one's public image, and "phishing", a technique commonly used to steal persons' identities, target an individual for spam mailing or other "anti-social" Internet activities.
Throughout this paper, the assumption I use is that the site should assume I know nothing of computers and should guide me through making my online appearance. All are free of charge, but, of course, some advertising is likely to be included.
I have been a member of Yahoo since 1991, when I first tried out their e-mail services in two accounts. Throughout this time, Yahoo has added new features like the my.yahoo.com page in which you can customize news feeds (RSS), weather, TV listings, etc. Then they added Messenger, in which those Yahoo members who were presently online could Internet Message (IM) easily to each other.
When the Yahoo 360 beta became available, I gladly tried it because it seemed simpler than my several aborted MySpace attempts, which I will describe later. Perhaps it would follow a certain Yahoo look and feel that I was accustomed to. There were easy "lists" to fill out with my interests, taste in music, the educational institutions I had attended, jobs I had held, etc. It was very easy to add friends to the page.
The nicest feature I found on Yahoo 360 was that a blog was available, which had several options I really liked:
Within 10 minutes of joining Facebook, I got an e-mail from a fellow I had worked with 5 years ago! Within two hours, about 4 more people were in contact. I had not even sent out one invite yet! Clearly, this is a place people can find out "whatever happened to..."?
Another thing I like about Facebook is the short "virtual tour" they give once your account is started or even if you have no membership and want to see what is available there. It's right on the homepage and should not make a non-techie feel that they are lacking computer literacy to be up to this task.
What I found so interesting with Facebook is that with a few clicks through "special interest groups" I could turn up exactly material about what I was interested in, but hadn't been looking for explicitly. In my case I am interested in publishing song lyrics.
This interesting transcript on musical copyright I found in about 15 minutes of poking around on Facebook. (I would provide the URL directly, but that requires that you are currently logged into Facebook with your own account.) The following is a capture, complete with misspelings, I took on Apr 16, 2007:
Post #1 1 reply Matt Giddens (London) wrote on Apr 15, 2007 at 4:40 AM hi all, jus joined this group and wanted to know if anyone actually knows the TRUTH about postal copywrite... i wanted to protect a few of my finished songs, so this guitarist i met said copy all the music and lyrics down as best u can...then post 'em to yourself...that way they r protected from people stealing them... ...but i doubt this would hold up in court... ...any ideas? * Send Message * Report Matt Post #2 1 reply Joshua Comeaux (Lamar) replied to Matt's post 18 hours ago all it's good for is proving the lyrics and music was yours at a certain date. Pretty much just temporarily protecting your music until your real copyright forms go through. here are the copyright forms your need for an actual copyright http://www.copyright.gov/forms/formsri.pdf (sound recording) http://www.copyright.gov/forms/formtxi.pdf (literary work) * Send Message * Report Joshua Post #3 Joshua Comeaux (Lamar) replied to Joshua's post 18 hours ago also I believe you need to mail in the forms with a COD, I forget how much though. * Send Message * Report Joshua Post #4 Matt Giddens (London) wrote 3 hours ago cheers joshua...i appreciate the forms, but i live in the UK....do those forms apply internationally? or tell me how u got them and i may be able to get a british version....
Facebook provided me with instant access to people who I had lost contact with over the years and a serendipitous encounter in their special interest groups which informed me about copyright on song lyrics. Of course, like much material on the Internet, this information about copyright may or may not be completely accurate, but certainly provides me with more information than I had before.
It is ironic that the worst of my experiences came from MySpace, from whom I had hoped the best. My issue with MySpace mainly regarded passwords and e-mail accounts. On my first attempt setting up a MySpace account, I uncorrectly put in an e-mail address differing from one character to my correct one. I absolutely could not fix this problem! Each time I would try to fix it, MySpace would e-mail the non-existant account with a link to some URL to update the e-mail address! Why did MySpace not check that e-mail bounced right away in the "enrollment" phase, to prevent this (common) problem from happening?
Months later, I approach the MySpace beast again and got an account set up with perhaps four hours of time spent doing the profiles, etc. I get busy with other things and do not access MySpace for several months. Upon logging in again later, I find that I managed to loose my password for the account. No problem, says MySpace, a password will be sent to the (this time correct) Yahoo e-mail address. Unfortunately, it never comes! I even check Yahoo's "Bulk" folder for spam, but nothing! I tried this about four times, but I never got the password resets sent by MySpace to my Yahoo mail account. (MySpace is operated by Google, so I wonder: is there some competition between Google and Yahoo going on?) At this point, I bail on the MySpace setup.
Just because I have had such time wasting experiences, I do not discount MySpace. In fact, many of my friends/aquaintences have loved it and even made substantial commercial progress using their MySpace Web presence.
I have first-hand knowledge that MySpace was used successfully for a commercial venture in self-publishing books. This was done by Debbie Ramsey, who found contacts on MySpace that enabled her to self-publish her first book successfully and recoup her investment. She has now completed and self-published her second book, "Chance Encounter". She hopes that if it also does well that she can approach the larger publishing firms, who are notoriously difficult to get signed on with. Information on how Debbie has leveraged her MySpace account resides at her own firm (S-corporation?, look, I don't know) Daydreamer Books.
Along with the wonderful capabilities these forums offer, they do present a new medium for fraud, harassment and Internet preditors. Also, people can publish pornographic images and other content that others may find objectionable. These sites post guidelines and rules for how they may be used and offer ways to address issues of abuse, report a concern, etc.
A second area of concern is that participants, particularly younger and inexperinced ones, can compromise their chances of starting and maintaining careers based of the content they post (and have posted!). For instance, a visitor does not need an account to browse for users using information that is readily available on resumes and applications, such as a postal code and age. A potential employer can utilize information provided by the applicant on MySpace's search engine. Thus, the employer may not hire a highly qualified candidate because he or she maintains an account suggesting rambunctious behaviour. Furthermore, even current employees could be said to be putting their careers at risk because they maintain blogs that criticise their respective companies. Even if they happen to spell poorly in their blogs, that fact alone can reflect badly on their job prospects! (No poorly spelling secretaries need apply!)
A third area of concern includes "phishing" for personal information for identity theft purposes. Or slandering other people with phony pages these persons did not set up themselves or authorize.
Since the whole idea of Yahoo 360, Facebook and MySpace is to connect people online with similar interests, there are ways to invite "friends", "geeks", etc into whatever groupings you like. These people must accept your invitation by hitting on a link usually sent in e-mail, but sometimes presented in a pop-up by an application like the Yahoo Messenger. (In this manner, Yahoo leverages its other features, here to get interest its newer 360 offering.) Invitees can adopt these or not as they choose. Of course we are all busy with our daily lives and may not have time for this just right now.
In this author's short experience, an invitation is required to search from either Yahoo 360 or Facebook, whereas MySpace permits much freer searching capabilities. That precludes some of the worries of general Internet searching on ordinary men and women that Wikopedia states is common. Perhaps my difficulties with MySpace perhaps were a blessing in disguise!? At the moment I am too busy with work and school to put up with the more negative aspects of a prominant online presence.This author believes that people desire, both on a personal and a business level, to reach out to others. Online forums like Yahoo 360, Facebook and MySpace are trying to fill this (unexpectedly large and growing) need. All of Yahoo 360, Facebook and MySpace offer very quick set up to a personal web presence and plenty of browsing and friend finding potential.
Yahoo 360 starts a new user out with an e-mail message of where to begin. Facebook does that sooner and a bit more simply in my opinion, particularly for a very new Internet user. MySpace seemed of all the most complicated to use, and for me became too completely difficult to tackle at the moment, although it seems to offer the greatest commercial potential.
Thus a new Internet service is offered and made attainable for use by even the most technically unsavvy. But care and common sense must be used to keep away from privacy invasion and the other security risks of this new type of personal presence.
Wikipedia, (2006). MySpace. Retrieved April 18, 2007, from MySpace
Wikipedia, (2006). Facebook. Retrieved April 18, 2007, from MySpace
Wikipedia, (2006). Yahoo. Retrieved April 18, 2007, from MySpace
Ramsey Debbie, (2006) Chance Encounter. Lilburn GA: DayDreamer Books.