Anyone can use these sites - companies and colleges, teachers and students, young and old all make use of networking sites to connect with people electronically to share pictures, information, course work, and common interests.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Kids are finding out about the potential for discovery online from other sources; many of them have computers at home, for instance, or their friends have them.
We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.
One thing we know for sure is that the Web is a collaborative medium unlike any we've ever had before. We see people working together, playing together, interacting in social settings using these media. We hope that will emerge as the new tool for education.
It simply is not true that everything is now on the Internet, but it is true that the digital resources available through the Internet have enormous potential for education and even for self-empowerment of individuals.
We already have a professor who's using an online social network of MIT alums to help educate students in programming. Just imagine expanding that in Facebook-fashion to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world.
If you look where kids are spending time on the Net, they may have all the information in the world, but they're not accessing it.
The Internet lives where anyone can access it.
The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.
If you think about photo sharing sites, the mobile photo sharing and social, there's no competitive advantage, there's no obvious business model, so I never play with anything like that. I avoid it like the plague.
I use Facebook all the time. I'm not a believer that they're going to do everything on the Internet better than anyone else.