Social Networks and Messaging

Begun in 2004,

Facebook is a social networking service and Web site.

Then you find other people you may know on face book and add them as friends.
 There is a lot of interaction between people on "The Wall", a bulletin board type device that changes as new additions are posted.
You have to be 13 yrs old to use the site but there is no way to prove your age so it seems to be a wide open field as there are millions of underage kids on the site.

Originally the site was for Harvard University students but it soon opened up to the world.
Created by Mark Zukerberg and Eduardo Savarin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
Zukerberg managed to wrestle the whole deal away from the others for himself.
The movie "The Social Network" tells the story of it's creation. The world loves Facebook

MySpace
Began in August 2003 in an effort to copy some of the better features of Friendster.
It was then bought up for $580,000,000 by News Corporation in July 2005. Nice money for the creators!
From then until 2008 it was the #1 social networking site
In June of 2006 it had more visitors than Google.

In 2011, Myspace had over 33 million visitors a sign of the constant decline in traffic since Facebook etc grabbed a lot of the action.
Sadly for the 1,600 employees, in 2009 many lost their jobs and now the whole shebang is run by only 200 people.
it is currently owned by Specific Media LLC and Justin Timberlake who bought it on June 29th 2011 for a measly $35,000,000.

Twitter exploded on the scene and became a hit all over the world.

It was instrumental in organizing the rebels in more than one social revolution where a dictator was eventually overthrown.

Consider the overthrow of Libyan Leader Moammar Ghadaffi and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak who ended up on trial.

Limited to 160 characters per message it is a form of social texting.
To use Twitter is to "Tweet"
 People can post images and text for people who "follow" them to see.

Sign up for "Twitter" and follow interesting people and there posts or friends and family.
 Many famous people are on twitter.