by Nicole Melzer
A few days ago, when shopping for a new mobile phone, a shop assistant presented me with one of those so-called smartphones. Music downloads, mobile shopping, mobile banking – what a great new world of possibilities and information.
Now I wouldn’t consider myself to be old-fashioned and I’m fairly open-minded to new technology, but this got me thinking.
“Connecting people!” is the very well-known slogan from Nokia. Being connected to your friends and followers at any place or time is what is distinctive of our time. This has been truly defined by the popularity of social networking sites, allowing you to share your thoughts, locations, links and so on with your friends wherever they are 24/7.
But what do you like to share with others? One simple question: would you like to share an interesting shopping website or funny video with your friends? Most of us probably would. But what about your online banking site? Or how about letting others discover that you’ve been browsing some, erm, sites of a more adult nature? It’s likely that this would make some of us feel a little more uncomfortable – however this type of online over-sharing is now a reality.
The new US social discovery portal Dscover.me enables you to share your browsing habits with your friends, and follow other users in real-time. All you need to start your webtours is Google Chrome or the special browser Rockmelt.
The idea behind social discovery tours looks simple: watch each other navigating the web and chat. Essentially you will share whatever you are browsing, although users do have some say in this. While it may not seem like you are giving away very much information, Internet services like Dscover.me or Sitesimon really blur the lines of what is public and private information and for me, the negatives of this really do outweigh the positives.
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