Facebook Costing Jobs?

I used to work at Ruby Tuesday, and had a friend that quit there right before they closed down. The reason: a facebook post. She had a stressful day at work dealing with the cooks and put something along the lines of giving the cooks anthrax as a Christmas present as her status update. Obviously, this was a joke. Seriously, who has access to anthrax? Well anyway, the kitchen manager decided to take this as a literal threat to his life and told the General Manager, who then brought the issue up with my friend. By the way, my friend had been there for about 4 years longer than this kitchen manager, so you can understand her being upset over the General Manager giving her a "talk" about this issue, that wasn't even really an issue in my opinion. So, long story short, she quit over the incident. This shows how social media can have a negative effect on your life.

Skyrim

So there is a new video game coming out called Skyrim. I absolutely hate video games, so the only reason I know this is because my husband is super excited about this game coming out. Anyway, the creator announced on twitter that there would be a game play trailer coming out today at 8 o'clock AM. The word spread so quickly through social media networks, word of mouth, etc. that when the time came to watch the trailer this morning, the whole website overloaded because of the amount of people trying to access it. I thought it was crazy how quickly the news spread from just one simple tweet.

Uprisings in Egypt

This article talks about the recent uprisings in Egypt. It states that some of the protesters arranged their events through social media sites such as facebook and twitter. Also, some of the people have put footage on youtube of the uprisings. This shows that social media can have a positive, and HUGE effect. Without these social media sites, not as many people may have shown up to protest, and they might not have been as successful in the uprisings.

Sources:
Boyd, E.B. How Social Media Accelerated The Uprisings In Egypt. Fast Company. Jan 31, 2011. Web Feb 21, 2011.

Status Update

A couple of days ago, I was on facebook, and left my account logged in when I walked away from the computer. My husband decided to play a little joke on everyone, and changed my status to "Getting a divorce... :(" He came and found me and asked if I had realized that my status had been changed. It had been about an hour since he had posted it, and I just thought it was funny and that I would go on and change it. Within an hour, I had 20 comments on that status. I also got a phone call from my mother and cousin wondering about the status. This shows how rapidly news travels on social media networks, and in this case, that was a bad, yet pretty funny thing.