Social Networking Sites

There are many social networking sites available for our use today. Through them we can interact with peers, friends, family, coworkers and even make use of these sites for business purposes. The most widely recognized social networking sites today are Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. Despite sharing the common purpose of brining people together and facilitating the exchange of information all three are distinct. Facebook seems to attract college students and recent graduates, as well as young professionals as the primary users. Facebook combines the idea of public forums, with private chat, and visual information sharing through video and photo albums. It is also a great networking tool for professionals, and allows to gain many new connections and knowledge. Facebook can also be used as a mini-ebay, with an application to buy and sell things within your area. It also hosts various free games. However, mostly Facebook is used to stay in touch with friends as a permanent substitute to personal emailing.
Myspace, originally used to keep in touch with your friends and meet new people, is now mostly used by bands to promote themselves. The amount of links sent by emerging artists is sometimes overwhelming. Yet it is a great free marketing tool, that also allows us to tap into various parts of the music culture, and discover new things. The layout of Myspace changed significantly from how it used to be a few years ago, now conforming to the popular templates of today's social networking sites.
Twitter is a great tool for live updates on what's going on with your friends, favorite celebrities, and the rest of the world who uses this amazing tool. Twitter enables you to send out a message to various followers at once, and thus is more of a public tool (especially with integrating mobile phone technology), versus posting something to Facebook which your friends may or may not see. This feature makes Twitter better at connecting large groups of people instantly when compared to MySpace or Facebook. The layout of Twitter is simple, easily customizable, and the tweets are easy to post. Twitter reminds many of us of mini-blogs, which are updated frequently.
Another social networking site which gained popularity a few years ago is "Friendster." Friendster is a site for online gaming similar to the games offered on Facebook, where you can collaborate with others in playing the games. Although I am not an avid game player, I believe that a teenage crowd would find this site very useful as a social pastime where they could also communicate with their friends and be entertained at the same time. In conclusion, Facebook seems to have combined a lot of the best features from many different social networking and sharing sites (Flickr, Photobucket, Friendster), and that is probably one of the reasons it has become so popular.