Social Networking Sites

MySpace – To be totally honest, I haven’t used MySpace since like 2008. MySpace chose not to innovate and update their website and they lost their spark to websites like Facebook and twitter. I mean, I guess it was kind of cool that you could edit your MySpace page with a little bit of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) or HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) knowledge you could personalize your page. At the same time though, a lot of the pages were crappy and just contained sparkly glitter graphics and 13-year olds pretending to be of legal age.

Facebook – I feel Facebook is the best social network at the time. They are always adding new features and making the interface simple and accessible to all kinds of people. Hell, even my mom can use Facebook, so I have to keep turning down her friend request. Facebook also took it to another level allowing people to not only communicate with their current friends, explore the site and find and add new friends, play games and listen to music, as well as shop and interact with businesses via their pages.

Twitter – I won’t lie I’m not really comfortable using Twitter. I acknowledge its popularity, but I just don’t see the point in sending messages out that are fewer than 160 characters. It just seems like I can get Facebook status feeds for that. However, in this class I’ve actually been using twitter a bit more and have gotten more accustomed to it. Hopefully in the future I’ll gain more of an appreciation for the interactions twitter provides and grow to master it.

Stumble Upon – Stumble Upon is my new favorite social media site. I encourage everyone to give it a try. It’s super simple; the way you set it up is that you set your interest. For example you can set that you’re interested in the arts and sciences. What it then does is randomly send you to pages with their meta-data listed as an arts and science website. You give the site thumbs up if you like it and thumb down if you don’t. Based on your thumbs up it sends you related sites. I’ve found a lot of great and interesting content on Stumble Upon as well as wasted much time that would have been better spent on school work.