By U.BATCHIMEG

How about listing all the advantages of social networking websites? One of the applications of Facebook website is “Group”. According to them, “it is for creating a group, adding friends, and starting sharing. Once you have your group you can post updates, poll the group, chat with everyone at once and more.” My friend joined a group on her Facebook account and it was about asking people’s opinions or voting one’s opinions in the survey. The survey is not long, just one question. Plus, people can add their answers to the question for people to vote. There were a lot of question from social issues to personal issues.

I will show you one example of the surveys. For example, “Who initiates traffic jam of Ulaanbaatar city?” And there were multiple answers, including “Policemen, Bad drivers, or Car accidents.” Above this survey, there were about 72 comments. One man commented “Traffic jam does not depend on bad drivers, but bad roads.” And others said “traffic jam is because of traffic light” etc. The survey above is just one example of the surveys of this group in Facebook website. Some people assume social networking is just for promoting oneself and one way of spending time ineffectively. Even some of the questions were bit simple, like “Where are you heading right now?” And it has 25 votes for the answers such as “To the future”, “To home” etc. And other question was “If you had to choose one of them, what would you choose to eat?” The answers were “Salty food” or “Food with no salt.” And for this survey, about 115 people voted. And the comments about this survey were like “Salty food is bad for health”, “Stupid survey question”, and “Do I have to?” etc. The group has over 2000 members and comments below the surveys were about debating. As I said debating, it included lot of curses and swearwords. For that matter, the survey group seemed unnecessary and useless. However, if we see it from another perspective, we can use group appliance of the site to see the opinions of young people or just people who have Facebook accounts about their opinions on more sophisticated and mature survey questions or issues. And it has application called “event” which is online version of invitation of events. Some of the organizations of Mongolia are starting to use this for announcing the events they want journalists to come instead of spending money on media advertisements. Events can be anything from conference to alumni meeting. And we can share news, articles and videos on other sites with our friends by posting them on our accounts. You might be seeing these websites from another point of view right now. We can economize our money and time by having an account on social networking website. How good is this? I will ask again “Is social networking for promoting oneself only?”