The students’ attendance was so good (438 students in total), I had to give my talk on two occasions for some problems with the size of the place, more than 200 students in each session. Each talk was around 1 hour, some general topics were:

1. A brief introduction about the evolution of the comunication, physical and digital.
2. What is “Social network” and  ”Social Networking”.
3. General characteristics of social networking sites.
4. History of social networking sites.
5. The most important social networking sites and interesting data.
6. the usage of social networking and difference between email & social networking sites.
7. Advantages and Disadvantages.
8. Desktop & Cellphone applications.
9. Social networking and youth.
10. Social networking and companies.
11. Social networking and México.
12. The future of social networking.

I tried to give my talk very interactive, so I received very good feedbacks about them. For example:

• 100% know Youtube and Facebook.
• 15%  don´t know about Twitter.
• 98% use Facebook as principal social networking site.
• 30% use Twitter.
• 25% use Metroflog.
• 5% use Hi5, but they didn’t found it interesting as Facebook.
• 90% doesn’t know the difference between Facebook and Twitter.

The principal questions were: business model of the social networks (focus in Facebook, Youtube, Twitter – how they make money), privacity/security of the data,  difference between social networking sites, and more. At the end, It was a pretty good experience for me.

I would like to thank to the teachers, L.I. Bertha Alicia Cobian Machuca and Ing. Emmanuel Alvarez Paredes for their kindness and help at the event.

Here are some photos, and also you can see more of them at Flickr:

I’m not going to review the movie, far from it, but I found very interesting how the Pandora Villagers could extract and share information from their deceased ancestors and alive people. It is interesting for one reason, the strong relationship with the current social networks and the possible future ones. The Pandora Villagers used the own nature as a database, which it was open, interoperable and linked, that means, they could used it in any physical media. Villagers could access to the information in any time and way.

The huge amount of data generated by users everyday in social networks cover a large percentage of Internet data, becoming an important source of information and knowledge, but We still live with hermetic databases, not interoperable social networks (except for desktop applications or social networks with the same owner), where the rich dataset (information) is reserved for popular social networks. This problem has wanted to fight with many projects (in conjunction with the Semantic Web, Linking Open Data and FOAF) with the main idea of the open and interoperable web. However, these projects are about 10 years and still have not been consolidated.

The nature of the Villagers to use the data  it is a bliss that we could see in our planet earth in a near future if It existed a general policy for each social networking sites, and not only create their own policies. I’d love to see someday the real and nature combination of Ubiquitous Computing, Augmented reality and Cloud Computing into social networks, for the simple reason: being a part of EVERYTHING and not just a THING.

It is difficult say that Web 2.0 became the Web in social, because since the Web was born people could collaborate and communicate online, but one of the biggest successes with the Web 2.0 is simple: the easy way to do it!. Almost of the principal services of this generation are easy and free; for example, people can create a personal page with social networking sites or write online with blogs without knowledge of web programming or pay.

Status

Now we see the hit of social networkings sites like Facebook with 350 millions of users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest in the world, amazing!, don’t you think?. And of course we’ve another good example of success but with a different type of communication, I’m talking about microblogging platforms like Twitter, that we respond a simple question: what do you doing?, and that simple question was adopted and also forgot it in the pass of the years. The different of social networks like Facebook and Twitter is in the way of people communicate (Facebook = Synchronous, Twitter = Asynchronous). The benefits of being a part of this sites are a lot, and of course you know them, but my favorites are the community, the social tools and the conversations, everything in real-time.

The buzz of these sites on these days are becoming a food of companies and for people, people think that social networks are generating a lot of money with them; so if we talk about the business model of the social networks used, we got a big black hole, for example, Facebook has got a good investors: Paypal with $500 thousand, Microsoft with $240 million and Digital Sky Technologies with $200 million dollars (and a few more), of course advertisement is other type business model, but this has not worked well on social sites. Twitter has the same history, they could not find how monetize the service.

Who are making money?

Social networks have provided a rich source of potential customers to the companies, the consumer has been centralized and labeled, so in a short deduction: free and directly publicity for costumers. So that becomes a great marketing for companies: being a part of the costumer conversation. Why do not we ask the directives of these social networks what they think about this situation? Making money though your site and you are only watching it.. Great!. I think this is certainly great potential to exploit now that there is strong demand from users.

Conclusion

In conclusion we could say that social networks are rich, yes!, but in users and information (data generated by users).