Facebook – Face it, its actually quite good

Back in the day if you wanted to catch up with friends you would telephone or meet them in the local boozer. Things have changed dramatically with the explosion of social networking sites. My first experience was Hotmail and MSN Messenger. This involved emailing people with gossip or talking to them via instant messenger. Now we have myspace, bebo and my personal favourite Facebook.

I have a very good reason for liking Facebook in particular. Of course it is great to catch up with old friends and keep in touch with current ones and it is very effective due to the ability to monitor everyones conversation with everyone. People have literally become addicted to this form of socialising probably for the same reasons they are addicted to Big Brother. As I’m quite sure as these sites evolve it will become more visual with live web feeds of your mates making their dinner or watching Hollyoaks or even on their laptops writing to you on Facebook as you watch them write….fascinating stuff!

Going back to my original point of why I like Facebook is due to its effectiveness as an academic tool. There are bioinformatics pages on there where academics can exchange ideas, provide advice, share experiences and network people. This would have been really beneficial for when I was studying my masters. Sure there are plenty of blogs but this is a lot more interactive. I suppose you could treat this as a live informal forum for your research area of interest. These are two that I found on here recently:

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics………the worlds toughest major

Get networking!