I am enjoying Christmas with my family and learning about gadgets. Everyone from my 3 year old nephew to my mom has new gadgets to play with. My eighteen year old niece, Allison, gave me a tutorial on MySpace and FaceBook. She pointed out the differences and what she likes about each.
MySpace allows you to make your profile accessible only to your "friends." She said there were creepy people asking her to become their friends and join their group, so she protected her profile. After you protect your profile only your profile name and picture are visible to people you have not approved. However if someone doesn't choose a profile name that is a derivative of their real name and posts a picture of their pet lizard, it may be hard to figure out it "soccerdude" is your friend from school or not.
FaceBook allows you to adjust the privacy more precisely. You can block individual pieces of your profile instead of all of it, like MySpace. For example if you don't want your friends to see the geeky picture of you in your new Christmas sweater. You can block that photo album from your friends and let your Aunt Paula see it. You can also block a specific individual from your account if they start annoying you. FaceBook has a cool feature in its picture album application that allows you to tag portions of pictures with the names of "friends" in your FaceBook profile. Say you get a great group shot at a football game. You upload it and then highlight one friend in the picture and tag it with their name. Highlight another and tag again. Then when the picture appears in your album, all the tags are hotlinks to your friends' profiles.
Gotta make a Facebook page for the new year.
My fourteen year old niece let me borrow her iPod. I felt a little all thumbs at first controlling the playlist, but with a few pointers I got it. My daughters soon took control of the iPod sharing the ear buds between them.
Here is our family electronics portrait! Aren't we a good-clicking crowd?
Technorati Tags: Christmas, FaceBook, MySpace, social networking, Web 2.0
