Facebook

Facebook.gif

Facebook is an online social network. It was originally used for high school, college and university communities, but has spread to the internet community as a whole. Founded by Mark Zuckerburg of Harvard University in February 2004, this online community has the largest number of registered users among social media sites.

Relationship to Gustavus

While multiple groups related to Gustavus may exist on Facebook's website, Facebook is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by the College.

Privacy concerns

While Facebook's privacy controls have been improved since its creation, it is important to remember that information one posts on social network sites like Facebook are potentially public to the entire world.

For students, privacy may not seem like a big concern now, but inappropriate pictures or information about yourself could come back to haunt you in the future, especially when searching for employment.

Calendaring and Facebook

Events is a popular Facebook application which allows users to create calendar events and share them with other Facebook users.

Facebook allows users to export individual events or a group of all events, using the iCalendar standard, which can then be imported into other applications like iCal or Google Calendar.

A link to an iCalendar resource for all of a user's events can be found by going to their events page, and clicking the "Export Events" link at the top. Facebookexportevents.png

This will pop open a box containing a link to a private URL of a user's calendar events. Facebookexporteventslink.png

It's important not to share this link, as it contains a secret key which anyone could use to view a user's calendar event information.

External links

Extensions