Facebook tentacles

Wethink - the Facebook tentacles are everywhere. Already enormously popular, the social newtorking site is aggressive and ambitious. Last week I met 3 other academics who are researching Facebook - more or less by chance, and there are many more. But according to this piece, Zuckerberg hasn't just been very successful, he's aiming for world domination, or at least web domination. The idea is to make the social graph an integral and ubiquitous element of life fundamental to the way we use and search the web. The stats are staggering. 4 billion pieces of information uploaded each month means there's a lot of digital literacy going on. But the article also points out that the 850 million photos and 8 million videos uploaded are hidden from Google search engines. Anyone wanting to access them must go through Facebook because the social network treats it all as its own data. So is there competion for our interest? You bet there is. And there's plenty of scope for critical analysis, too. Time for educators to get active!