Facebook knows your Face!

Everyday, more than 100 million photos are tagged on Facebook. It works like this: Users can mark people they know on photos. Then, Facebook connects these marked pictures with the fitting profile.

Life and how development changed it

Wow. This is going to be my last post. I can´t believe how fast 9 weeks of personal development went by. I say personal development because I learned a lot about my interests and the opportunities in our fast changing world. I introduced you to several inventions on the web and tried to evaluate them: facebook, Second Life, Fiverr and lots of other interesting things I  learned about, too.

By introducing you to all these little tools of our everyday life I tried to point out that our life is full of opportunities and definitely different to that from previous generations. We are the generation Internet.

Last weekend I have been to a really amazing festival. We had lots of fun, listened to great music and lived without any connection to the outside world. Well, I enjoyed that for three days, but after that I could not wait to get connected to the Internet again and check my facebook. It is part of my life and will always be. I have to admit.

Trash TV and other disasters

Last week I saw the final show of Germany´s Next Topmodel. I expected an interesting show with lots of fun, interesting guests and good entertainment. All I got were boring comments from the host Heidi Klum who wore an awful outfit. (Well, I know I have talked about her before, but she seems to be really important for the German TV culture). The show was boring, without any intelligence and I waited without any success for only one tiny highlight. This happened during prime time when one usually is expecting high quality entertainment.  How can that happen? Why is the most interesting aspect of the show the never-ending commercial breaks? But not only Germanny´s Next Topmodel is like this, also other shows like Daniela Katzenberger´s documentation of her life don´t contribute anything to the cultural education of our country.

Firstly, TV means making money and people seem to butcher it more and more. Breaks for advertisements every 15 to 20 minutes are not rare and during shows like “Deutschland sucht den Superstar” there are short commercials offering the newest mobile phones. Commercials seem to have a big impact: In 2010 Tv commercials had a business volume of $ 180 billion. Indeed the commercials fund the shows and we can watch them for free, but often they are really distracting.

Secondly, people offering TV shows produce what the target group wants. That makes sense. However, very often it turns out to be trash TV. After a long day of working people do not want to watch movies where they have to use their brains. All they want is to watch a light show where a mid-20 blond girl gets her nails and breasts done.

“Hackers” – the biggest threat for the Internet nowadays? –

Since we upload our personal data online, we have to consider the consequences. Businesses, e.g. Facebook, guarantee great privacy protection, but when it comes to outsiders, who can still ensure safety?

If we register on a webpage or if we buy something online, we are leaving our traces everywhere. Contact data, bank connection, home address… a real treasure for hackers. A hacker is defined as a person who breaks down the security system in computer networks for several reasons. Some of them hope to make big profit; others just want to show how easily they can crack down the security barrier, or because they are motivated by the challenge.

5 bucks and you are in…the world of Fiverr and Co.

I am sure a lot of you guys have the same problem I have: lack of money but still so many wishes to fulfill. I would really like to travel to Spain this summer, but have not enough money for a flight. So what can we do? Well, we could start to work in a restaurant or at the movie theatre. That is what most students do. Work  two days a week and there you get be the money. However, the Internet again offers unexpected possibilities for every situation.

Did you hear about Fiverr before?

Well, I did not know it until I was searching for an easy possibility to make money.  Fiverr is about services. Everybody can offer a mini-service to be fulfilled for 5 bucks. The offers are really variable: There are people willing to translate texts from one language into an other, others offer a wakeup call and even others want to send you a postcard from Thailand. It seems to be really funny and interesting, sometimes a little bit crazy, as there are offerings to get rid of a girlfriend on Facebook. Crazy world. 😉

But how does it work in real life? First, people make an offer on the web. The persons that are interested in a service pay 5 $ via PayPal and receive the service.How do the operators of Fiverr make profits? They keep 1$ of each transaction. The service provider gets 4$. Therefore the operators are definitely interested in many transactions, they can make huge profits. Welcome to the online money machine. How do I as a customer choose among various offers? People are as always able to evaluate others. So if a provider has a lot of good feedback, he might be able to make some money.

McDonald….fast food for the world

Eating. One of my favorite hobbies. Who doesn´t like food? What do you think about a really greasy Döner or having a burger at McDonald after spending a night clubbing in our favorite city Berlin? Is there anything better? I doubt that.

People love the possibility to grab some fast food when hurrying to work, meeting up with a friend or  going by train. Our society eats on the road, there is no time in our fast changing world to sit down and spend more than a half an hour in order to eat. McDonald has around 2.9 million people visiting a day only in Germany. In the year 2010 Subway had a profit of 15,2 billion US dollar worldwide. These fast food companies are everywhere and they make everyone realize what globalization means.While I spent a year abroad  I ate the exact same Burger at McDonald in America as I did in Berlin, even the restaurants themselves looked alike. The same food all around the world. Fast food companies give you a feeling of home, you know what you get when you go inside and there will be no disappointment most of the times.

Globalization makes the whole world a home thanks to worldwide operating companies like McDonald, Burger King and Subway!

At the same time there are more and more people suffering from obesity in the world. According to Spiegel online 25% of all Americans are heavily overweight. People consume without considering what they eat, often they

You can´t hurry love..How to find the perfect soul mate

Everybody of us heard about online dating and single platforms. There are plenty of them and they promise singles to find the perfect love. Well, I (by the way I am a single person) read these ads daily and figured out that I should participate in order to test the offers by myself. Let the self-experiment begin. 😉

Firstly, I have to say that before the test I could hardly take these platforms seriously. Can I really find a new partner in just one click? To begin I typed in single into google search in order to find some definitions and maybe some helpful hints. I got 2.040.000.000 results and was overwhelmed by all the opinions and offers. On the one hand there were a lots of blog entries of singles that shared their feelings of being alone (in a really funny way though).On the other hand there were various guides about how single persons are supposed to behave, but also a huge offer of dating platforms. Unbelievable. How to choose the right dating platform? Well, I have no idea. I had to pick one offer randomly. At that point I still was definitely sceptical and could not really believe what online platforms had to offer.

Nevertheless, the figures speak for themselves. Dating platforms make huge profits every year ( 179,5 Mio. Euro in 2009) and  even during the financial crisis there was an increase in profits of nearly 10 %. Every month 7 million Germans search online for the right partner and 5.4 million of them claim that they were successful.