Although totally different, they both serve to connect friends together and allow them to see about their friend's daily lives.
Facebook
Upon first glance, the Facebook layout is more complicating. The home screen has many titles, providing the user with many different tasks that they can perform.
When you access the website, you are met with a sign up screen automatically. It suggests that there is no way to access the website’s main features unless you sign up for the service. This is a great way for the website to promote people to sign up, and also to gain as much people as possible.
When you sign up, you are asked to input details about yourself. Such information as your full name, birthday and email address. This information is automatically shown to everyone on your Facebook profile, but can later on be changed so most information can be hidden. I see this as an unnecessary means of allowing other people (possibly strangers) to access information about yourself. Once you’re set up and have a profile sorted, you are able to add photos, add videos, play games and various other types of media; most of which are shown to everyone. Facebook does warn users about the privacy settings, and if under the age of 18 does change the settings for you, so some of your content is automatically hidden when you sign up. Facebook is aimed at people who are ‘computer-friendly’ (people who know quite a lot about computers and networking) and would, more than likely, know how to change the settings. This would also explain why there are so many media applications and games on the website.
Personally, I think Facebook users’ details are shown to the public too easily, and Facebook should clearly warn or just block people from viewing certain information when you first sign up, as people can easily get side-tracked into putting too much information up for others to see.
The main way to socialise on Facebook is to comment (leave a public message on their profile page) each other, but you can also socialise on Facebook Chat.
Facebook Chat is an online instant messaging service that Facebook provides when you sign into your Facebook account. It lets you socialise without other people viewing it but also allows you to see who is online and on Facebook at the moment you are. It is a great feature that allows you to talk to your friends without the need of Windows Live Messenger to be installed.
Facebook has received recognition in the workplace and many companies have installed programs that disable access to social networking websites, so that employees focus on their work.
The Wikipedia page for Facebook claims that ‘Facebook has been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service’ [1]
As well as time being wasted in the workplace, another issue that can arise is privacy/confidentiality being leaked on status’s. A great example is in the medical workplace, where doctors/student doctors have in the past posted about their daily lives in the medical industry but involved too much information.
This is explained in this article:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/medical-students-leak-patient-info-facebook/story?id=8650491
Facebook has also received much criticism in the past over many events.
Events caused because of arguments on Facebook, or involved the website.
Here are some examples of infamous events:
http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/facebook-hit-list-raises-fears-3-colombian-teens-murdered-an/19606812
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/8557273.stm
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1208147/First-cyberbully-jailed-Facebook-death-threats.html
Facebook targets the age group of 16-24 but people of all ages use the website.
The oldest person reported to have used Facebook was Ivy Bean of Bradford, England, who joined Facebook when she was 102. Ivy later claimed that Facebook was too complicated and moved over to Twitter.
Twitter
Ivy became more popular in the public domain after she joined twitter at the age of 104, becoming the oldest twitter user ever. When Ivy died, the public began to donate to the nursing home she lived in and donate to charity.
This article was written the day of her death:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/28/ivy-bean-oldest-twitter-dies
Generally Twitter is totally different to Facebook, but still serves the purpose as a social networking website. Twitter has a simplistic layout, far more simplistic then Facebook, and when people first go on the website, they are taken to a more interactive home-page; with an interactive scrollbar labelled ‘Trending Topics’ and with a regular update called ‘Top Tweets‘, which refreshes the most popular ‘tweets’.
The language used by Twitter throughout the site, tends to be slang, using words such as folks and it also tends to be second-person narrative, as if the website is talking to you directly using words like you. This allows the public and users of Twitter to feel more connected to the website and therefore more than likely sign up to the website.
When you sign up to the website, you are instructed to enter some information about yourself, but unlike Facebook, Twitter only asks for your name and email. This is a good idea as your information is not given to the website, and therefore not distributed on your profile. As information is not inputted, it’s not necessary to have it on the website, so Twitter only include your name and your picture when you visit a friend’s Twitter profile, but there is also room to write other information. Below is a picture of what information you give out looks like on your profile:
Twitter has many popular features that differ from Facebook. Twitter users are able to ‘follow’ someone, which means their Twitter ‘tweets’ become visible on your news feed. This is totally different to Facebook, which requires people to send friend requests to one another, and can only view their full profile if the other accepts the request. A Twitter user can also view another user's profile even if they are not following that person, but this can be changed easily in the privacy settings.
Twitter also only lets a user post a ‘tweet’ with a maximum of 140 characters, which enables more quicker, faster, simpler updates. This is helpful and ensures that twitter users do not clutter up with long updates and instead are short and get the point across in fewer words, and means that slang and ‘text-type’ (shortened language used in text messaging) are commonly used.
As Twitter is a key way of keeping updated on public issues and events, many events have become famous through the Twitter website.
Below are links to some examples:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/03/twitter-kanye-west
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/4518473/Stephen-Fry-posts-Twitter-updates-while-trapped-in-lift.html
Twitter is used by a wide age range of people, but on average used by 20-30 year olds. Because of the way users ‘tweet’ and share their updates, it is more commonly used by busy people, and used by famous celebrities. It allows them to write an update with just 140 characters, and therefore does not take as much time as Facebook for getting in contact with people. It also lets celebrities quickly post a link to possibly a document or a picture and save time explaining.
Although Twitter has no Instant Messaging service as Facebook does, Twitter allows users the choice to change how their Twitter looks to other people. It allows them to change their background colour/picture and also how the text colour would appear to others. I personally think this idea is good, because it lets users show their individuality in contrast to Facebook, where every profile layout looks the same.
Below is an example of how a Twitter news feed might appear:
After looking at both websites, I feel that social networking is used in people’s lives far too much. Facebook entices people to share information including pictures and personal contact details, which could lead to fraud or fake accounts. Twitter needs to be more strict with it’s privacy settings; allowing people to follow others without the need for requests. Social networking has only recently gained popularity during the last 5 years. From personal experience, I know the websites cause arguments and this can be avoided by not using them as much as people, especially young teenagers, do. A study showed that ‘Using Facebook regularly could make users insecure, narcissistic and have low self-esteem.’ [2]
It could also lead to personal information being put out in the public domain, which could inevitably cause family or relationship problems.
On the other hand, social network websites are a good tool to reconnect old friendships, and could also be helpful when getting in contact with teachers, lecturers, bosses or anyone you urgently need to talk to, as opposed to calling or emailing them.
It can also provide teenagers with the confidence to meet new friends, and go to events which can be organised on the sites. They are a good way of getting a message across to a lot of people at one point.
Out of both of the sites, I would choose Twitter because it causes less problems for people and is a lot easier to use. Nonetheless, Facebook can only cause problems if you let it, or if you give away too much information. I think the real message people need to focus on if they are to sign up to a social networking website is, be careful what information you put on them, as you never know if anyone is who they say they are.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook 7.9.2010 22:45pm
[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1310230/Facebook-users-narcissistic-insecure-low-self-esteem.html 10.9.2010 3:58pm
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