THE SOCIAL NETWORKS
Group Essay
With a rise in the demand for social networking and connection sites, many
companies have attempted to be supreme but have proven to be insufficient. With a
growing market, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ have proved their dominance on the
scene with the ability to provide their members with multiple ways of communicating.
Whether someone wants to share a picture of what is for dinner, follow a celebrity to
learn his/her opinions about the upcoming election, or simply “hang out” with friends
through a video conference, there is a site that meets the needs of that person when it
comes to online interactions.
Facebook is the leader in social networking; like much of the Internet, it is a great
innovation. Facebook was created by three college students: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin
Moskovitz, and Chris Highes to allow other students to network and meet one another.
Facebook offers a person an opportunity to interact with a huge universe of new people.
One can built an online identity and learn more about how the internet works to create
new relationships and communities. Facebook allows people who probably never would
have met one another in person to communicate by creating new friendships and
relationships.
It places distance between people who could communicate person to
person but instead choose to do so online. The way a person navigates on Facebook is by
first creating an account by simply putting one’s name, email address, and creating a
password. Facebook has made it so easy to find friends, by suggesting people one might
know based on the location in which the users live, even based on where users work.
Also, once a person has friends, Facebook suggests more friends, just by interactions.
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Facebook has a “timeline” layout; it is a cover page of one’s Facebook, and it can be
customized by adding photos and content that reflect one’s personality. What makes
Facebook so amazing is that it did not even exist until 2004.
Today there are
approximately 84.5 million active users on Facebook, and the numbers are growing.
Twitter is the third highest ranking social networking service.
It was first
brainstormed at the company named Oreo in March 2006. Jack Dorsey envisioned an
individual’s using SMS to communicate with a small group, which later spun off into his
own company in April 2007. What is Twitter? It is a service to post and receive
messages to a network of contacts. People who subscribe to Twitter become “followers,”
and then they are allowed to “follow” other people. Twitter has no limit to what a person
is allowed to post, but it does have a limit of 120 characters that can be “tweeted.”
Instead of sending masses of emails or text messages, a person can send one message to
his/her Twitter account, and the service will distribute it all to the “followers.”
Conversations can be carried on among groups of people who are following one another,
or a simple message update lets others know what is occurring in a person’s life.
Twitter had had several prominent events, but the one that stands out the most is when
Twitter crashed. This event was when American Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.
Users were updating their status at a rate of 100,000 “tweets” per hour.
Google has been around before Facebook and Twitter. However Google+ is
fairly new to social networks. Moreover, it is gaining a reputation fast. The goal is for
Google+ is to surpass Facebook. In the first two weeks Google+ opened, it had 10
million users; just two weeks afterwards, it had 25 million users. Google is popular
mainly in the United States and India, but it is being used by many countries. In order to
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get access to Google+, one needs to sign up with a Google email account, which is free to
create. Google+ is new in many ways. First, it allows video chat, otherwise known as
“hangout,” which allows up to nine people to speak at a time. While “hanging out,”
people can share YouTube videos as well as their thoughts. Google+ also has another
feature known as “Circles.” These allow users to organize and differentiate between
friends and family. Google+ “Spark” permits users to identify topics they might be
interested in sharing with others. Just like many social networks, Google too has its own
application, which also allows “hangout” and status updates. Although it may have a
different layout, it still connects users to their family and friends.
Social networking sites have changed the way people communicate and interact
with one another. Whether a person wants to share pictures, follow celebrity “tweets,” or
video conference with friends and family, one thing that Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
have in common is that they are causing people to interact less frequently in person.
Social networks have also made sharing personal information so easy that it seems one
has no privacy anymore. They have provided an opportunity for a person to become
whoever he/she wants to be on line, in some cases, someone he/she cannot be in real life.
The question is just how impersonal will relationships be in the next five years?
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