Dear Facebook users,

Dear pupils, dear students

Be careful !

As oral exams are coming (BTS students , you know what I mean ! TSTG pupils : one week + Easter Holidays and we’re done !) you should be very careful about Facebook !

FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.

The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.

Researchers have discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.

About 83% of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.

“Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon.”

You can read the full article here

MySpace is now losing popularity as Facebook and bebo are the “places to be” .  MySpace suffered a drop in visitor traffic last month and is now less than half the size of its younger rival, Facebook. MySpace’s loss of status as the cool place to be is an object lesson in the notoriously fickle internet, where today’s cultural icon is tomorrow’s passing fad.

MySpace had 124 million monthly unique visitors last month, a decline of 2%, according to the marketing research company comScore. Facebook, by contrast, racked up 276 million unique visitors, an increase of 16.6%.

MySpace is clinging on to a marginal lead over Facebook in America but trails badly in Europe. In Britain, Facebook overtook its competitor in September 2007, the comScore data shows.

Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research, said: “In the last 12 months Facebook has extended its dominance in every territory in Europe.” However, he added: “I’m not convinced that it’s terminal for MySpace. The battle isn’t over yet.”

from : http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/29/myspace-facebook-bebo-twitter

Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user. That staggering growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Read more about it here

A funny video, as everyone seems to be on Facebook now … (everyone, even myself …)

Facebook is increasingly popular, especially among teenagers. I’m sure you heard about it !

This article from The Guardian (a British daily paper) deals with the fact that Facebook can also be extremely useful in transplant donor appeals. People who need a life-saving organ can now have a better chance !