MySpace, Facebook still relevant after college?

NY Post - Some Rethink Posting of Private Info

Throughout high school and college, your MySpace or Facebook entry must be filled with your postings about school, social life, and crazy events and images, plus comments and responses from friends and other visitors.

What you put on your MySpace or Facebook is for public consumption unless you explicitly set your entry to private so only your close friends can access it. For people who blog (like myself) and use social-networking sites, we have to realise that these places are really public and anyone can read whatever information we have uploaded, posted, and commented on.

Thus after college graduation, is it still appropriate to leave your personal page as-is? Probably not. Some examples from the article above:

Chuck Sanchez, a 25-year-old Chicagoan, recently deleted references to his public relations firm on his MySpace page after everyone from a job applicant to his fiancee's mother found the page.

Rachel Hutson removed some photos from her college sorority days after she took a job as a civilian working for the military. She's also made her Facebook and MySpace profiles private, so that only friends she approves can see it.

With everyone becoming more savvy with the Internet, more adults - teachers, parents, university admissions counselors, and prospective employers - can find your personal webspace via Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine. No matter if you deleted the page or changed it, it will take some time before it is completely purged from the Internet (note Google's cached page example).

Some of you may think it's invasion of privacy, but there is nothing you can do to prevent me from looking you up on Facebook or MySpace, or your own personal blog journal. If it is accessible on the Internet, it's public.

There is already increasing occurrences where employers are informing applicants that they will check up on their personal webpages or social-networking sites as part of their background check.

So if you want to remove some "embarassing" photos or cleaning up offensive posts or comments, now it is the time to do it. Or make your site restricted to just close friends and colleagues.

It is not about free speech. It is just about being more aware and to educate ourselves to be more cautious and careful.