Facebook: Social identity or identity theft?

No wonder what you might be thinking as a leader or a manager, many of your subordinates are always one step ahead from you. While you are thinking of browsing websites and setting up e-mail addresses, your employees and subordinates are using Facebook for enabling communications and creating social networks.

Initially, my personal response to Facebook was pessimistic since it looked similar to the platform of Hi5 friends network. I did not like the Hi5 network as because it spams tons of mails in my inbox and there are millions of popups when you visit the site, which eventually can take you to infinite internet exploring. I might be wrong because Facebook is getting more and more popular these days and there are many professional communicators who are using Facebook. One example is Lee Hopkins who uses Facebook. In addition, there are many others who are using Facebook for many different purposes. The CIA or employers use Facebook for screening purposes, which means you do not have any secret identity. Well we do not need any secret identity, but accessing my personal information by strangers is kind of mysterious and that makes me scary.

I am still confused how Facebook is making the social networking work. Most of the facebook tools are loaded with flirting tools like graffiti, pokes, cookies, emoticons, etc. It quite seemed to me like a dating or a chat site rather than a social networking platform. Perhaps it may be a great tool and I might prove wrong. But what I am requesting is to be cautious about your social identity while being on the social network.