Keeping Connected or Stalking?

Social media sites are a great way to stay connected with friends and family, or are they? With all the new updates these sites have it makes it easier and easier to keep track of every move your friends make. Earlier this fall, Facebook made a drastic layout change that had most of the Facebook world in an uproar. Added to the side of your home page was a live action news feed. The feed shows exactly what people are doing such as becoming friends with this person, commenting on peoples pictures and post that you aren't even friends with, attending this event and putting this as their status update. Most people would consider this a whole new level of stalking people, and they could be right. It's hard not to look while it's updating every second that you're on your home page.

Then you have the browse friendship page. This is where you can click on a friendship with two people your friends with and see everything that has ever been active between them. This includes all the pictures they are tagged in together, along with comments they've written back and forth, and even random posts they've both commented on. These actions take staying connected to a whole new level.

What about Foursquare? Awesome site, lots of ways to get free things just for visiting stores and places you go everyday. Considered by some a fun game to play with friends by checking in here and winning points and badges and trying to beat your friends. But Foursquare is an easy way to track people's every movement. Where you go is no longer private knowledge once you start using this site. When checking into a place you can publish it to your other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, where it will then post it to that site so people can see where you are. It sounds like fun and games but do you really want people to know where you are at all times.

Even though we may find this as a great way to stalk people close to us companies and businesses find these as great tools. Ways for them to find out how often people are coming to one of their stores and being able to reward them for visiting often. It's also great for them to see when they're being talked about and keep up with their traffic and fans. Even still people love their social media sites whether it is staying connected or "stalking."

Posted by: Jenna Greene