Internet is now the home hub for communication and social media, more important now than its ever been. Absolutely fundamental and essential to the way the world works. If facebook were a country it would be the worlds 4th largest between United States and Indonesia.
Facebook
Facebook has been the largest growing social media site, although it has been the largest growing and with the most members there are lots of other social network sites. The up coming social network site is called ‘Qzone’; it is a Chinese social networking site. The statistics below show that the site has over 481 million. Behind that is twitter, with approximately 200 million users it is quiet far behind Qzone and facebook. There are advantages and disadvantages of using social network sites such as facebook, MySpace and twitter, one of the biggest advantages is that you can contact your friends when you wish, other advantages include being able to meet new people. Did you know that 1 out of 8 couples in the U.S met on social networking sites... It has truly revolutionised the world we live in today. Although there can be some disadvantages the main one I think is of the scams that are now developing onto social networking sites, other disadvantages include you can get harassed online but it can easily be stopped by blocking a person. An additional disadvantage is that it is time consuming! You can easily get distracted or get into a convocation with one of your long lost friends and end up chatting for 2 hours! Here is a fascinating video I got shown the other day...
Email
Email has also been on massive growth since it was first created in 1972, by a person called Ray Tomlinson. Last year in 2010 more than 107 trillion emails were sent throughout the year. With an average of 294bn messages per day. It is said that nearly 90 percent of all the emails sent in 2010 were spam messages. I personally use email a lot, mainly because it is much easier, quicker and definitely more efficient that sending a hand written letter. Emails are mainly used in the business and enterprise world. An advantage is that schools have started using email systems such as Microsoft Exchange. I think that it is great that schools have started using emails because if a student is stuck on some homework and cannot complete it then they can simply email their teacher and get a reply within a short time. An added advantage is the amount of paper that emails have saved, I presume that it is a lot. On the other hand there are obviously disadvantages of using email, some people take advantage of being able to send out lots of emails at one time. Some people take this into their advantage and send out spam mail, some of these may include virus’ which can ultimately damage your computer and you could lose all of your data. All in all I think that email has had a popular rise in users over the last few years, the efficiency and ease of it has taken the world by a storm.
Blogging online has no become more popular, there are over 200 million blogs. They are becoming more and more popular simply because you can post whatever you want and no one has to know about it, kind of like an online diary. The majority of blogs have added features where you can insert images, videos and hyperlinks. Most companies now use blogs than you can subscribe to and keep up to date with all their latest products, I think that this is a good feature because if you love a brand you are going to want to keep up with all their new products. Some companies even give out discount/coupon codes to people who keep up to date with their blog.
Instant messaging is a real time text based chatting systems, it allows you to talk to anyone and get a reply in seconds. Main providers of such systems are MSN and Skype. MSN is Microsoft’s real time chatting client; it was released in 1995 and has been growing and getting better ever since that nowadays you can use the software on either PC or Mac. How does it work? You sign up with your email address and you use that as your login, after you have logged in you can add your friends via their email address. Subsequent to adding them you can then chat away and get replies within seconds, although the other user must be online for you to be able to chat to them. You can also send pictures, videos and any files via MSN. Advantages of the system include the real time chatting, you can also have a face-to-face call via your webcam and microphone; this is an added bonus for people who have relatives around the world and want to see them in real time. While it has excellent advantages everything must have some kind of disadvantages, the only one I can really think of is people taking advantage of being able to send files, and instead sending virus’ via it.
The other main competitor is called Skype, it also is an instant messaging service, and it was first launched in 2003. Lots of businesses use Skype for video conferencing since you can have a multi way video chat which MSN does not have. It is a very useful service, you can also call mobile phones and landline numbers but you must buy Skype Credit which is very competitively priced compared to mobile phone contracts. Overall I personally think that Skype is better, mainly because it can do high definition video and it has the features of MSN as well.
Mobile phone companies have no started to adapt and put in Instant messaging systems to their mobile phones, the leading company to do this is Blackberry with their application called Blackberry Messenger which is basically a texting service but is free all over the blackberry platform, you can also send pictures, contacts or even your location if your lost and you want a friend to find you! Rivals Apple are currently developing their own instant messaging software for the iOS system, it will be called iMessage and should work across the whole of Mac platform. I think that it will be interesting to see how iMessage and Blackberry Messenger will compare to each other.
Forums
Forums have also impacted on the way we live; a forum is an online discussion board where people can talk about anything they wish. There are usually named forums for anything, e.g sports, technology and fashion. Some advantages of having your own internet forum on your website is that it will get people coming back, this will also increase traffic on your website which is a bonus. The main disadvantage is that I think you can easily get addicted to forums and feel like home in a community, therefore wasting a lot of time online.
Overall I think that social media is very important to our lifestyles, it has really changed the world that we live in today. Hopefully it will be good to see the way it develops over the upcoming years.
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