Facebook and Twitter Are Changing The Game

Facebook and Twitter Are Changing The Game

According to Hitwise, Facebook, a social networking website, is now the number one most visited website in the United States over taking Google who has long held onto that title. In 2010 Facebook accounted for 8.93% of all website visits in the USA while Google accounted for 7.19% of all US visits.

Facebook started out as a college website for Harvard students in February of 2004 under the name "The Facebook". Founded by a few college roommates, including Mark Zuckerberg, the social networking site slowly added other area universities and Ivy League universities to its exclusive list throughout the year. By 2005, the service had expanded to most colleges in the US and by 2006, the service would be open to anyone over the age of thirteen. In fact, many renters living in Wylie, TX apartments have an active Facebook account.

Facebook didn't invent social networks, but the service has transformed how we know them and become a staple of the world's connected citizenry over the years. In the past four years we have learned to update our statuses, tag photos, play games while at work, and stalk our friends and acquaintances. Facebook was able to capitalize where its predecessor, MySpace, failed miserably. Most notably is the amount of spam on Facebook. While spam does surface from time to time thanks to rogue applications or clever hackers, the amount of spam pales in comparison to MySpace in 2005 when users were inundated daily by mass messages. MySpace also had a mood' update field that was rather clunky and uninteresting to use, this transformed into the Status Update, a more in-the-moment message about what a user was thinking or feeling.

From 2006 to 2010, Facebook has continued to change and grow, drawing in new users and connecting old friends around the globe. However, Facebook is not the only social media website that internet users are posting their updates too. There has been a multitude of other social networking websites pop-up in the past few years promising everything from mobile updates, to real-time updates and more. The largest of these services is Twitter. Twitter started out as an idea to make a blog post via SMS messages by the Odeo blogging company. The service launched publically in mid 2006 but didn't garner much attention until the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX the following year. The original concept has been adjusted slightly due to the rise of smart phones and how users have been engaging with the service. While the ability to update twitter via SMS still exists, most users update using a twitter application on their blackberry, android or apple phones.

Twitter seems to have two major uses: for celebrities and businesses to update their fans or consumers and for communication during emergency situations. During the blizzard of 2010 the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey used Twitter to send out tweets asking citizens to help one another get through the heavy snowfall. The mayor was out in the blizzard himself helping get vehicles unstuck and sending out tweets asking citizens for help or praising those that stopped and helped on their own.

Twitter has also been used by customers to lash out at companies when they are upset. Earlier this year, film director Kevin Smith was asked to exit a Southwest Airlines plane for being a safety risk due to him being overweight. Kevin took to his 1.6 million Twitter followers expressing his outrage with a bit of humor inspiring his followers to lash out at Southwest as well. For this reason, renters looking for Plano apartments use the social sites to garner reviews for apartment communities. They have also used the site to see a UMoveFree review before using their apartment locating service.

Just as the telephone and email has changed how we interact, Twitter and Facebook are again changing how people interact by allowing us to post short, timely messages and allowing our friends and family to reply or ignore those messages.

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