This morning I opened my weekly American Airlines NetSAAver Fares email and was greeted by a new offer from AA. “Start Sharing Your Travel Adventures! American Airlines is now on Facebook,” the email declared. “Keep your friends updated on your travels around town and around the world!” In and of itself, that seems to this High Flying Bird to be a useful add-on to one’s Facebook page, if one had one, as that is exactly what we try to do here on our blog. It’s the Facebook aspect that I found disconcerting.
Exactly how young and hip is AA trying to be? I clicked on the link from the AA email to the Facebook sign in page and you have four choices for “occupation”: in college/graduate school; at a company; in high school; and other. Then, the page specifically asks for your work email. Is Facebook for young professionals or for students? Either way, I’m afraid it’s not for me, as I did a quick search for others from my high school and found only three people from my class of 1986.
But that’s ok, because I find the whole Facebook and MySpace page phenomenon to be scary. Exactly how much do we want people surfing the internet to be able to find out about us? Eliot Spitzer’s “date” from the Mayflower hotel had to quickly scrub her MySpace page last week after her real name was released by the press. What if you apply for a job and your prospective boss routinely does a search of MySpace and Facebook pages to find out the real story about potential hires?
What do other High Flying Birds think about these social networking sites? And how about LinkedIn, a professional shared-contacts site that I have gotten numerous invitations to join from people my own age? Useful tool or potential trap for the unwary?
-- The Commish
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1 comment:
confused. maybe the sites would be cool if we tried them?
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