By Tessa St. Marie
Editorial Intern
When was the last time you tweeted? Or wrote on someone’s wall? Or updated your status for the News Feed? If these terms seem foreign to you, here’s a bare-bones explanation of the most popular social networking websites.
With more than 434 million users on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, social networking is the thing to do when surfing the Web. While they may seem overwhelming at first, social networking websites are relatively easy to use and provide users with access to news, entertainment, and millions of people worldwide.
MySpace
On MySpace, users create personal profiles. With a MySpace profile, you can upload photos, write about yourself, play a song for visitors, and write blogs (diary entries that anyone can read).
MySpace users can find other users to be friends with. Typically, these users are people you know (coworkers, family, friends), but MySpace can also be used to meet new people. Users can visit their friends’ profiles and write public comments on the profile, blog, or photos. Email-like private messages can also be sent. MySpace has a multitude of additional features including instant messaging, a news service, classifieds, and discussion forums.
Even though MySpace introduced the world to social networking, it is quickly losing popularity to Facebook.
Facebook
Similar to MySpace, Facebook users can create profiles that they fill with photos and more detailed information. Facebook users can find friends as well as receive friend recommendations from the website. Like MySpace, Facebook friends can write comments on each other’s “walls” and send private messages.
Facebook users can also write short statuses about themselves. Statuses are immediate notifications that can be about anything, like future plans, accomplishments, and feelings. Statuses, discussions between Facebook friends (known as “wall-to-wall” ), and other online actions are added to a live News Feed for everyone to see.
Facebook users can join groups with a variety of causes, from “Stop Animal Cruelty” to “We Go Slightly Out of Our Way to Step on Crunchy Leaves.” Similar to Facebook groups, users can become fans of television shows, celebrities, restaurants, and other things.
Originally made for college students, Facebook now has a diverse population in age, wealth, education, and location. In a recent study, there are more grandparents than high schoolers on Facebook.
LinkedIn
Like MySpace and Twitter, LinkedIn is another social networking website. However, LinkedIn is geared for professionals rather than young adults. Users create a profile that closely resembles a resumé and can connect with friends, colleagues, potential employers, and businesses.
Employers can post job offers and learn more about potential hires based on that hire’s connections.
Twitter
The newest of the social networking brood, Twitter is different. Users don’t have elaborate profiles, photo albums, or walls for comments. Twitter users (a.k.a. “Twits” ) write 140-word blogs (a.k.a. tweets).
Similar to the Facebook status, tweets can be about anything under the sun. Maureen Evens, for instance, writes shorthand recipes in her tweets, while Ashton Kutcher tweets about his day-to-day observations.
Rather than becoming friends with other Twitter users, Twits can become “followers” of other Twits. Similar to Facebook’s News Feed, the Twitter homepage is a compilation of tweets from people you are following.
Mobile
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all have mobile capabilities. With a cell phone, users can update their tweets and keep completely connected at all times. New cell phones are now designed with websites like Facebook and Twitter in mind.
Privacy
Whenever personal information is online, it is important to practice extreme caution. While it may be fun to meet new people online, understand that anyone can put anything online, regardless of reality.
MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all have privacy options that can limit how much strangers, as well as friends, can see. It is recommended that if you want your profile to remain public, keep personal details broad and unspecific. If you prefer to put personal information online, keep your profile private and only visible to people you know.
It is vital that parents know what and how much information their children are putting online. While stories about predators using social networking website are rare, it is extremely important to exercise caution with young adults.
