Social Networking Sites

Social Networking has become such a broad way of describing the leisurely online activities people do. While a grandmother might throw them all in one "bucket", I truly see the difference between them all. 

Twitter only allows you to express yourself within 160 characters. To some that is pointless, especially those who have much to say. What I do love about twitter is the introduction to hash-tagging  They created a way to compile all tweets/messages when referring to a specific topic. #brilliant . This allows a huge span of promotions and advertising to be done. I often look at what is trending worldwide out of pure curiosity what people half way around the world care about. (follow me @rjm29). I find it very interesting that people can "follow" you but you don't necessarily have to follow them.

Facebook put a control on what Myspace did not. You have to abide by their profile standards whilst Myspace literally allowed you to create the space however you wanted. In comparison, I preferred the ability to change my profile based on what I was interested in at the moment. In fact, my first impression of Facebook was not good at all because of this. I truly enjoyed choosing a song to play when you arrived at my page. I guess they wanted a more uniform way to compare and contrast pages? Not really sure the purpose of the strict timeline rules. Comparatively to Twitter, on Facebook your friends work both ways rather then one way and you can post anything from pictures, videos, essays, and statuses. Recently, Facebook lifted the 160 character limit on statuses to separate themselves from Twitter.

Through all of this comes a huge dent in the social media market, Instagram. Whoever thought of this was #brilliant. A true collaboration of Facebook and Twitter where you can share your pictures and have followers not friends.

Social Media is only growing and is expanding to the younger and older generations that it might not have touched before. I look forward to seeing the evolution of it.