THE NEW GENERATION OF INTERNET USERS

By Zhang Wan-ling[5]

Today's generation is online all the time. We meet new people, make business contacts, get to know our friends, plan our parties, browse through each other's pictures, and get major and minor life update all at the click of a mouse. If a relationship is official it's going to be on Facebook. I someone gets a puppy, there will be photos on PhotoBucket, Flickr, or MySpace within the hour. If you're not quite young enough to already be spending hours a day on these sites, and if you're not quite old enough to have given up on the Internet entirely, let this article be an easy introduction to networking sites in general and also some of the premier social networking sites available in Taiwan.

Statistics tell us that the most popular social networking site in the U.S. is, in fact, MySpace; the users of this site are mostly teenagers and young adults in their 20s. In MySpace, users can share their personal information, photos, music, video clips, blogs, and favorite links with their friends, as well as strangers.

Rivaling MySpace to become the most popular networking site is Facebook, the brainchild of a student at Harvard who thought connecting Ivy League campuses across the United States would be a cavalier idea. After a few years in business, Facebook, which is also a free service, went beyond the typical profile page, enabling users to add applications and real-time chat. And, of course, the heart of the site is for sharing your likes, dislikes and pictures with your friends and the greater online community.

Though mst users regard the networking sites as harmless fun and a brilliant way keeping in touch with friend and family, big business sees these sites as a bottomless goldmine of market research and sales potential. This type of information harvesting can lead to a lot of controversy about privacy, however, and disillusion some users. As it turns out, not everyone wants their information to be collected, not every user wants personalized advertising, and not every young person wants big business to seen them as a "potential for market research" instead of an individual human.

This clash of interest is part of the ugly side of the networking site movement and has acted as a force to turn scads of people away from what others consider to be simple fun. No matter what camp you stand in on the online networking issue the fact that these sites are the way people connect nowadays is undeniable. And, even though this trend started in the United States, it has been making its way around the world and websites like these are available in a rainbow of languages, all over the globe. In Taiwan there re quite a few personal websites that are accessible to everyone and many are topical; site subjects range from professional networking and expansion and making friends to nightlife and dating or finding singles parties.