Social networking: Present simple and progressive

Social networks help get things done. More and more people are using social networking sites to find and maintain personal and business contacts. The concept has huge potential: You post your interests and projects, and this helps people with matching interests find you. So how does it work? Watch this video, which explains it all in plain English. It's by Lee LeFever and it runs for just 1.47 minutes.

One of the fastest growing sites is Facebook, a young company headed by a 23 year-old CEO, which now rivals MySpace. But how good is Facebook as a tool for social networking? It turns out that only one of the twelve IT executives polled recently by silicon.com said that they use Facebook for networking or business-related activities. Most of them favoured rival social networking tools from either LinkedIn or Plaxo — and good old-fashioned face-to-face contact.

This week, our grammar exercise focuses on the present simple and the present progressive. First we join Michele and Florian from the "biz quiz" (Spotlight 2/2008) as they review Florian's favourite mistakes regarding verbs ending in "ing". Then we look at the language executives use to assess social networking sites. Ok? Let's go!

Anne Hodgson