Social Media

So, this whole social media thing is interesting. MySpace, Facebook and now Twitter have all had a niche in the social media world. Personally, I feel it all started with MySpace, a website for people to create a profile that represented themselves and interact with friends in numerous ways. It allowed you to manipulate your profile however you see fit. Perhaps the most interesting and controversial aspect of MySpace was the “top friends.” A lot could be told about a person with just a glance at their top friends, such as who they hang out with, who they’re interested in of the opposite sex and sometimes celebrities or bands were also put on peoples top friends. In the midst of the MySpace craze, a website called Facebook became public and slowly users began to transfer over to the newest sensation. Facebook had numerous features; ability to post statuses that told their friends what they were up to, tag friends in pictures and statuses, upload pictures and videos, Facebook even had games that could be played from the website itself. Perhaps the most iconic feature on Facebook though was the ability to “Like” statuses, pictures, comments, virtually anything on the website. The users gained instant gratification from this feature. As the Facebook craze began to slow, Twitter has most recently taken the nation by storm. Twitter is perhaps the most versatile of all the social networks. Users create a handle or a codename rather, and are limited to 140 character “tweets” or statuses. Instead of having a friend count on MySpace and Facebook, users on Twitter have followers. The unique feature of Twitter happens to be “hash tagging.” This feature allows users to put a pound (#) symbol followed by key word(s). This allows users to see all the tweets associated with a certain hash tag, which tells the user what everyone else is saying about that same topic.

Each social network has its own features and various aspects that make it unique. Everyone has their favorite based on features, allowing each one to develop its own identity.