Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a social book marking website. It can be found at http://del.icio.us/. This website was was created in 2003 and in 2005 purchased by Yahoo! This site is very convenient. Most people keep bookmarks on their PC's, however, when they switch computers they do not have access to the websites they have bookmarked. Del.icio.us fixes this problem. With Del.icio.us you are able to bookmark your favorite sites and access them from any computer with internet access. You are also able to share sites you've bookmarked with other people.

This can be very helpful in an organization. Because this website allows you to share your bookmarks people within an organization can share their bookmarks. This can be helpful for linking information needed for projects or other tasks people may be working on collectively.

Affordances:
-easy to find information you are looking for
-collaborative, use what others have found
-keeps track of websites for you

Though, this technology is really helpful I did find a couple of drawbacks while using the system. The main drawbacks are that you must use the Firefox browser. It is not compatible with Internet Explorer. Though, Firefox is quickly becoming the browser of choice, even if you are using Firefox you are still required to install an extension. This limits the access power you can have on different computers. However, if all the installations are complete the website is very effective in communicating web information to many different people.

Overall I would rate this technology a 3 out of 5.

Facebook.com

By Tyler Endres

Facebook.com is a social networking web site, first introduced on February 4, 2004. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student, who initially started Facebook as a hobby project. When it began, Facebook was only available to Harvard students. Within two months Facebook’s availability was quickly expanded to all Ivy League schools. Over the next year universities around the world were quickly added to the social networking web site. High schools and some large companies were eligible to join just about two years after the launch of the site. Today, the site has over 64 million active users and is the 7^th most visited site according to Alexa.

Some advantages of using Facebook include, giving friends, classmates, and co-workers a place to communicate with each other. Users are given the opportunity to decide what they want and don’t want to share, with users in their networks and their selected friends. Facebook is a one-stop site for sharing media, calendaring, blogging, communicating, sharing information, etc. Facebook.com is also available in a mobile version, which gives users access to the site anywhere using their cell phone.

As well as advantages, Facebook also has disadvantages. Sharing too much information could be a problem for some people. Other people say that using Facebook is just a waste of time. The site can also allow complete strangers to view someone’s profile which could have bad consequences for some users.

I believe that Facebook should be used within an organization as an informal means of communication for employees, managers, etc. It could allow an organization’s users to create relationships with each other, which would be harder to do without Facebook.

Overall, I would rate Facebook.com as 5 out of 5 on its usefulness because of its unique ability to connect people over the web.