Social Media and the Web 2.0 Questions

1. I think in the future, amateur user-generated content will improve because technology will become more and more easy to use and amateurs will easily be able to edit and create content. It is also becoming cheaper to make higher quality content. It seems like almost as soon as the newest piece of technology comes out, it is outdone by the "next best thing." I think professional content will improve instead of declining to meet amateur content because technology is advancing more and more everyday. In the past few years, America has gone from color television to HD to now 3D is coming out, mostly in the movies but in television as well.
2. The Social Media Sites I use the most are probably Facebook and YouTube. I think Facebook has been more successful than MySpace because it is easier to use, has the feature of the News Feed, and has better privacy settings. Myspace was difficult to use because in order to edit a profile, you needed a lot of different codes. Facebook's profile is much more simple. The News Feed on Facebook also makes it really popular because you can see what everyone else is doing right on your home page. You can customize your home page to see just a few people you are close with or leave it as everyone you are friends with. You can also easily comment on other peoples' activity right from your home page. Facebook's options for privacy also make it more popular than MySpace. On MySpace, you could hide your profile from strangers but that was it. Any means of hiding your profile was easily maneuvered around with the use of Firefox. Facebook allows you to customize your privacy, down to specific portions of your profile and specific people who are allowed or not allowed to see it. I think Facebook will last a while, but it is hard to predict whether something better or more popular than Facebook will be invented.
3.Transparency is an important issue in social media. Companies do not realize the reaction that people will have to some tactics. Many companies have been accused of astroturfing in the past few years. They have used fake grassroots methods to push advertising. This is basically done by either pretending to be normal people and supporting the company or taking something like a letter that supports the company and making it look like a lot of people were saying that instead of one. Politicians use astroturfing too. The goal is to increase support for the politician or company by making it look like a lot of other people are supporting the company or politician. People find this to be misleading and get very aggravated when they find out about these things. I think it is important offline but it is more important online because everyone uses the internet as their connection to the world and it is very easy for corporations or politicians to use the internet for deception. One example of astroturfing is Comcast v. Big Ten, where Comcast pretended to be normal people, talking negatively about Big Ten Networks. People trust other normal people, so they will listen to them, but when they find out that a company was posing as a normal person to deceive customers, they will not be happy.