22/01/2011 by JohnB.

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking site, has just been valued at about $50bn. We hear often of the advantages of this website but what of the drawbacks:

• Advertising is targeted totally to you, how do the advertisers know about you and your likes/dislikes?
• Some people spend hours a day, searching for friends and updating their profile, it is addictive.
• Depending upon your privacy settings (most people don’t know how to change them) your entire profile is there to be read by anyone with a generic Facebook account.
• Potential employers and abusers look at Facebook to see what you are doing or have been up to. They can even check out your friends and family.
• How far are we detaching ourselves from real contact, in the real world some “Facebookers” would not have have any friends. Some claim to have a thousand friends plus, these types have definitely built up a psychological problem.
• Cyber bullying is rife at the moment and it is also so easy for someone to go off the deep end and insult a whole family group in one go. Or to threaten to kill.

Facebook should keep their money safe because I feel that maybe in the future someone will try to take them to court for allowing threatening and abusive behaviour and for giving “facetime” to those that have lost the plot.

Posted in Finance | 3 Comments »

10/01/2011 by JohnBuck.

The Supermarkets are doing amazingly well in the current economic climate. Or are they doing amazingly? Not in my view, they sell food and food is what everybody wants and needs. Every year they take more trade away from smaller shops and have claims that they have increased their turnover by 1% etc. There are now too many town high streets with vacant shops, that is apart from the odd Tesco Express.

Supermarkets sell everything and with the likes of Amazon and online shopping in the end there won’t be any shops at all. Let’s just sit back and let the big boys make all the profits they want and say that it was all their hard work!

Posted in Finance | 3 Comments »