Facebook

This facebook project to me was pretty interesting. I create events all the time, so that's what I chose. I was going for a real Social Networking test here. I wanted to see just how many people I could get invited to this event.

At first, I created this event and only invited 250 people. The next thing I knew, there were 100 people already RSVPed, but 300 that were still invited. Before I knew it, everyone that Invited was inviting more people to this fake event. It was spectacular. I watched the numbers rise every day! Before I knew it, there were 500 people invited, 700 people invited, and this morning, there are 500 people that have clicked Attending, and still 1,500 that are waiting on replies!!

It's an awesome thing if you think about the powers that this really shows. If you think about how I only invited 250 people last tuesday, there are almost 600 attending, and 1500 more I am waiting on hearing from. Just goes to show you how much people really are connected.

For me, Facebook used to always be about connecting with my friends. I was always checking up to see what everyone was up to, and where they were. Many of my friends are in some branch of the military, so it really is the easiest way for me to know where they are, and especially where they are being stationed and to make sure nothing happens to them. But then I started using Facebook for work. When I became a supervisor it was an easy way to get one message out to everybody at once, and to quickly ask someone a question about work.

Facebook is a great business tool. It allows businesses to reach a wide audience for free! I know there are some businesses that give out Facebook coupons. It also gives businesses opportunities for customers to leave feedback in their own ways.

I think it was totally fine for a professor to ask for you to friend them. There has to be an understanding though. A professor cannot ask to be your friend on Facebook and then try and judge you or even to get you in trouble for something that's on it. It's almost like parents. When my dad friend requested me I told him that if he friended me, he can't say a word about anything he finds on my facebook or if he doesn't like anything. If he doesn't like it then he shouldn't be my friend.

Information on facebook is totally public. I don't care what anyone says, even if you make your page "private" it is always public. Everything that goes on Facebook never disappears. People can always seem to find it and bring it back up.

There are some rules I think, but I don't think everyone follows them. Like I said, Facebook is totally public. So if someone was to say something nasty about someone else, even if they were not friends, it would get to them. Look at how my project has reached over 2000 people in less than a week. Stuff travels fast, and bad stuff travels faster than good stuff for sure. But something good about Facebook is that it really is open to everything. People can post what they like, creat what groups they like, and have what pictures they like. If people don't like it, they can just turn the other direction. Its a really good open concept type of program.

I don't think that I have ever really had something awkward arise because of something I posted, but I think it would be awkward if the peole figured out the random status updates were about them. That would be hard to explain and keep my cool.

With the readings, I found out that what they talked about is pretty much what I was talking about. Many of the comments and opinions were similar to those I made, esecially about how professors should use Facebook as a communication tool, not as a way to get information or anything like that. I'm happy to see that my opinions are pretty consise and along the lines with others.

UPDATE: As of 10-31 there were currently 3,008 people invited!

UPDATE UPDATE: As on Nov 1st, there were 3,113 people invited! And I've almost reached
1000 in attendance!

As of 2:07, there are 3,574 people invited!


This was a comment I recieved from this project. Some people just have to ruin it for the others.

"my clicking "attending" has no relevance to you and is an inappropriate way to determine credit in a class. This seems to be an assignment devoid of any value and if anything has a negative impact due to energy consumption and wasted processing power and storage space, all of which has actual cost.

I'd recommended a pea...ceful rebellion of your class against such an assignment. You deserve to have your grade determined by your actions, that's why plagiarism is such a concern in academics and this is nothing more than the promotion of such principles - the only difference being that while in plagiarism you get credit for the work of someone else by pretending its your own, here you get credit by the actions of others without even the presence of conscious to pretend that you are getting credit for your own actions.

Your teacher should be ashamed!
(this is not an attack against you, but a defense of your right to a real education)"

Wow dude. Just wow

On Nov. 8th, there are 5,147 people invited to this event!! This event has grown more than 25 times what it started at with 200 people!

The video Project

Clearly my Video project isn't done. I've been running into a lot of problems with it. First of all, my interviewee wasn't available until the friday and saturday of this weekend, so I definately wasn't able to get it posted by 5pm on Friday.

Secondly, the worker in the equipment studio never gave me a mic cord, which I know is my fault for not checking before I left. I tried to use my own mic cord at home that had an adapter. Aparently it did not like it because everytime I recorded something the playback was just solid static. So I had to improvise and do it without an external mic.

And THEN! I uploaded everything to my computer and was going to use Windows Movie Maker. Well when checking which files I wanted to upload, there was no problem. The clips were playing fine. But when I imported them to Windows Movie Maker, and tried to drag them down to the timeline, aparently Windows Movie Maker only thought the clips were audio files. So on my computer, I could not edit these at all!

So needless to say they will definately NOT be done for class today. I'm hoping to get down to the editing rooms tomorrow and try using Final Cut Pro for these. And hopefully by wednesday or so I will be able to have a finished product. And probably not one that I would have been so proud for.

What can I do? The mysteries of technology! Sometimes it just doesn't work!

Well finally I was able to get my videos to appear. Apparently I either needed to use a Mac or just needed to use their software. So instead of using Final Cut Pro I decided to use iMovie. I've used final cut many times but wanted to try something new, so I tried iMovie. And boy let me tell you, it was MUCH easier than final cut. I still think my product came out decent. I would have liked to use a little bit more high end camera for it, but with the equipment and the fact that I didn't even have a mic chord to use, I still think it came out fine.

Thanks to my old roomate Sammie for talking to me about being a Photography Major at Buffalo State. She was really patient throughout the whole thing, thank god. I'm glad that she's always available when I need her for projects, and I'm usually the source for her photo projects as well!

Editing for me was not hard. I planned the video segments so I already knew what was going to be plugged in where, so it was only a matter of rearranging and trimming down some of the clips and i was set. I put in some fade to black transitions just because I've never been a fan of a simple cut. I embedding much of my b-roll as the actual footage and used the audio from my interview to underlay the b-roll. My total video was just over 3 minutes long, which is good because it fits in the time frame that we were supposed to fill, but it also is short enough that it will hold peoples attention.

I uploaded my video on Blip and Youtube. I was going to do Vimeo, but I didn't export the video the right way the first time, and accidentally uploaded it to Vimeo, and it wouldn't let me upload another video today because I didn't pay to use their site, so by default I had to use Youtube and Blip, which I don't mind because I was going to use Youtube anyways.

Uploading for me on Blip was not hard at all. I think it was the easiest. As I am writing this I am impatiently waiting for the video to upload on Youtube. Blip took about 5 minutes to upload. Youtube has already taken 15 and it's only 13% done right now. I hope I am going to be able to upload it because I think there is a class in here in like 30 minutes, not to mention that I have class too, so I might have to come in later and spend an hour or so to get the rest of it to upload. So annoying.

This is my video from Blip


I will edit this post later when the Youtube video finally loads!




So I think that my YouTube video is correctly done, but my Blip one might not have been done right because it takes a very long time to load to view.