Social Networking Sites

   There are many social networking sites all over the web. If you dont want to bother with signing on to a bunch of them to see which one is best then dont worry because i took my sweet time to do so and will be blogging about it.

   My first encounter with a social networking site was back in high school when i subscribed to Sconex. I was pretty impressed being able to talk to my friends from high school and comment on their pages. To me, there was no other social networking site that was better, but that all changed when everybody moved on to Myspace. I'll tell you what, browsing through Sconex felt like i was back in the stone age after i subscribed to Myspace. The structure now seemed terrible in comparison, the entire page was filled with groups you had joined, they should have been in another tab, not in the main page. It's a bit ironic since when i didnt know anything besides Sconex, i though it was the second coming of Jesus.

   So i abandoned Sconex, it was too primitive for my sophisticated taste, now i had my own space. Myspace really made me see the grand scheme of social networking sites, through Sconex i would only be able to contact high school students, but through Myspace, the world was the limit. I felt a little overwhelmed by this, but nevertheless i enjoyed it. It was like a more polished Sconex, one would share personal info in predetermined spots in your page. The fact that one could customize their and page made Myspace a much more engaging experience. I remember it like it was a competition, who out of all my friends would have the best looking page, it was time consuming to say the least. Also a feature that i really liked about Myspace was the music features. I remember spending hours upon hours discovering new artists or songs and then making that song my profile track. Everybody would try and have the "coolest" artists and pages, seemed a little juvenile now that i look back.

   Then i went away for college at Binghamton University and made new friends and they asked me"you have Facebook?" I was like "wha...?" Well and then it all started, signed up on Facebook and boy i remember having the same feeling i had when i upgraded from Sconex, NOW Myspace felt dated and immature. Facebook had and has a certain "umph" to it that other sites just dont. I guess its the user interface that really got me hooked. Everything was so intuitive and efficient. I continued back and forth between Facebook and Myspace (had most friends there) until i indefinitely abandoned Myspace. I remember how annoying it was receiving so much spam mail in Myspace, to this day, at least in my experience, spam mail is non existing in Facebook. The best feature about Facebook was and is the status updates. It just feels right constantly updating and replying to comments you get afterward. Its extremely addicting, gives a perceptual reality of being with the person, obviously not physically, but the fact that you are conversing about whats on yours or any other's mind really enhances the experience.

   I recently signed up to Twitter, never really saw the point in doing so, since i already had Facebook and micro-blog through status updates, but now i see how its different. In fact, Twitter is a lot more engaging in the aspect of micro blogging then Facebook is. Through features that allow for you to tweet or reply to one or however many people you want at the same time, Twitter separates itself from Facebook. Finally, the limitation of only being able to tweet 140 characters is an incentive to keep a conversation going, because there is no way you will say all you have to say about a controversial topic in a couple of sentences, well at least i know i wont!