"This is MySpace! You're in my Facebook! Don't touch my Twitter!"

The 21st century has, so far, brought us a discovery of water on the moon, the Human Genome Project, the iPad, 'Stargate Atlantis', and....social networking trends.

Launched in 2004, Facebook was first out of the gate for significant social networking. With the ability to keep up with and stay in touch with friends while donning your own unique profile, Facebook was streaming through thousands of dorm rooms and millions of operating systems. And, honestly, who doesn't like to go to their homepage and find that they've been "poked"? However, recently, with Facebook's ever-changing and questionable privacy settings and formatting, new announcements are making some people less, not more, inclined to use it. In the past, many users' safety had been compromised when their accounts were hacked into and mass amounts of spam and viruses were sent to their friends. True, if you don't fully log out of your page on a public computer, or you don't change your password regularly, you may be setting yourself up for a possible hack. But Facebook was, and still is, receiving many raised eyebrows.

MySpace had its time to shine from about 2006 to 2008, knocked off the top of the charts by Facebook's steadily rising visitor numbers. MySpace started off as the headquarters for interacting with celebrities. To be honest, I never signed up for MySpace and, therefore, don't know that much about it. I'm pretty sure that I saw some cobwebs and heard some crickets, though, when I visited some friends' MySpace pages. Do people even remember that they still have accounts? Just saying. I do know that MySpace has had its share of security problems as well, many being sex offender related.

*Insert rolling tumbleweed*

 

Enter Twitter with its blue bird mascot! (And "fail whale" for those less functioning times that do occur). Twitter has a mascot. How cool is that? Remember in high school, the coolest mascot always won out. Twitter's popularity took off in 2007 and is quite addictive. With real-time posts, news stories, and updates, celebrity postings and photos, Twitter has millions of users and is dishing out some serious 'tweetage.' I have recently started using it and very much enjoy it. The biggest 'competition' now lies between Twitter and Facebook, with new features for the latter being eerily similar to the former. As with anything people, be smart when you're on the web. Okay then. Go ahead and continue tweeting or playing Farmville.