Affinity portal is a website that offers portal functions such as news headlines, web search options and interaction platforms. However, the content of such a website focuses primarily on its products and the company functions. These portals allow people to participate in discussions with others who have the same affinity or similar group identification (Ashley, 2014).
Facebook is an example of an affinity portal. It is a platform that people with similar interest can share ideas and experiences. Facebook is a social networking site where people interact about various issues such as economics, personal issues, religion issues, education, and political issues and so on. Facebook as a website provides the following functionalities that makes is an affinity portal
News Feed
News feed is a Facebook feature that provides highlights on profile changes, events, birthday among other updates. This feature also shows conversations taking place between the user’s friends. News feed enables people to keep track with the daily events and changes in activities within the Facebook website. The feature has however been upgraded with the latest being very efficient.
Networks and groups
Facebook enables people to form groups based on specific agenda. These groups can either be academic, religious, political, ethnic affiliated or even business oriented. These groups make it easy for members to share information across a wide spectrum and get divergent opinion from members of these groups. More often than not, these groups are always used as discussion platforms.
Search options
Facebook offers a search option where one is able to search for specific information from Facebook especially those that relate to how Facebook as a website operates. One is able to find information about his friends, information about group discussion and even existing groups that may be of interest. The search option feature searches for information based on identity or names and one is able to filter from the large pool of information the specific information by minimizing the data by being specific.
Facebook should actually improve on the relevance of the ads they make as news feed. These ads should be directed to the user base and they should be relevant to the core users. Another point of concern is the search option. Facebook should offer more specific search option for example providing search tabs for every aspect such as news, friends, groups etc.
Facebook used advertising revenue model get its revenue. Adverts made as news feeds by Facebook are paid for. It has advertising spaces that the website uses as a revenue generation platform. Additionally, Facebook promotes adverts or pages at a cost. This is also an avenue of revenue generation. The current target base for Facebook is to have a system that allows for people to share their ads with the people they care about based on what they do off Facebook (Nick, 2010).
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