Super SNS

Since I prematurely spoke about social network sites in my previous post, I thought I would narrow the scope and talk about Facebook and Twitter.

I had abstained from social network sites for a good while, following the decline of Xanga, Myspace, and Sconex. Engaging with my friends on those sites were pretty fun while it lasted. However, after a good while, I relapsed and decided that I needed to jump on the Facebook bandwagon. I joined Facebook around 2007, my sophomore year of high school. Like the aforementioned sites, I started off by filling out information for my profile, and started adding people that I knew to my Friends list. It was  and still is a great way to network with people that I know and people that I may meet in the future. I would say 99% of the people in my Friends list are people I have interacted with before in person. The remaining 1% are people who are fairly higher on the social status ladder than the lay person (musicians, celebrities, etc.). I am less inclined to add someone as a friend if I have not interacted with the person in the flesh.

What I like most about Facebook is the long-term connection that is established when I friend somebody. I can keep in touch with people that I used to interact with and see what they are up to. Seeing pictures of people getting wasted the previous weekend or albums which feature pictures that are taken only 5 seconds apart make for great conversation pieces.

I do not see Facebook ever going out of style because you can do anything on it. You can share pictures and videos, play games, and interact with others. The fact that Facebook developers keep innovating the site to keep it invigorated is also a plus. Facebook Messenger in my opinion was a great add-on. Unless some other social network site becomes popular, Facebook will stand the test of time.

As for Twitter, I joined it when it was a little ahead of its time. The "Twitterverse" was first introduced to me in high school by my technology teacher. At first, my reaction was to look to my friend and say, "What the hell is this?" We both chuckled, because Twitter at the time was mostly white space. It was simply Facebook stripped down to only its "status" function. I had not used Twitter until most recently. Before I really made visiting the site a hobby, I did not see a point in joining the site because I was so tied to Facebook. However, that all changed when I wanted to interact with celebrities. I feel that with the boom of celebrity endorsements, joining Twitter has become a social phenomenon. Before Twitter, there were only a few ways to reach celebrities - via live chats, mail, and blogs (if they had them). The interaction between celebrities on Twitter and their fans can be paralleled to that of indie bands on Myspace and their fans, but to a much larger scale. Indie bands on Myspace sought to promote their music, but celebrities on Twitter are not out to promote themselves - they simply use the site like any other person, but with a vested economic interest.

Tweeting is not just simply posting a status. Whenever a tweet gets sent, anyone in the "Twitterverse" can view it with the simple search of a keyword. Hash tags have paved the way for trending topics, thus having news spread like Californian wildfire. There is also the "retweet" function, which sort of follows the "reblog" function that blogging sites like Tumblr have. I certainly have less Friends on Twitter than on Facebook, mainly because Twitter does not fit everybody's tastes. I started using Twitter more since I got my iPhone, and I would prefer the app to accessing the website online, mainly because of the layout. Reading tweets on my phone is like reading the news. I follow several sports beat writers, and at times, I receive news faster on Twitter than I do on ESPN or Yahoo!

All in all, social network sites have made life much easier on a social level. If I want express my thoughts or feelings to the public, I can post a status or a tweet. If I want to contact someone that I have not spoken to in a long time, I can. If I want to share photos and videos, I will have no problem doing so!