Social Networking Sites

Facebook appears to be more family and close friends oriented than the other sites. You are able to share more about your life through a variety of mediums, through your status updates and  pictures (where you can tag location and who you are with, as well as your mood), sharing links (articles, music, other social networks), liking pages (job place, favorite ice-cream, restaurant, musician, etc.). Facebook also gives greater management to who views your posts than other social networks. You are able to filter posts to where only one person sees it, a school group, only family, or even where everyone but one person sees it. This feature seems to parallel how we interact in our everyday lives, picking and choosing what information we share and with who. When you "friend" someone, you both view each other's posts, like Myspace and unlike Twitter and Snapchat, where you don't have to follow those who follow you. 

Myspace allows more user customization, making it more blog like or website like than the other social networking sites. You can customize your background, the layout of the features on your page, what features appear on your page and even what music you choose to play. Myspace allows you to make all of these changes by editing the coding of your page! You are basically creating your own website. I believe there is not a Myspace app available for mobile viewing.

Twitter focuses on writing status updates. It also limits the user to 140 characters per post. This focus on writing increases the amount of communication that occurs among users since that is what is mostly posted. Sharing of ideas, opinions, one's daily activities and people's reaction to it is probably greater than on other sites. You are also more likely to get follows from people you don't know. This is probably due the RT feature where users re-tweet your tweets and their followers now see what you posted and may follow you as well. 

Snapchat appears to value privacy over everything else. Snapchat automatically deletes pictures and videos and allows you to manage how long any video/picture you post lasts on your “Story” line, and even send to specific users. You can send a video to a specific user and have it automatically delete after 5 seconds, for example. This increases the chances of sending risqué videos and pictures while decreasing fear that it may be saved to ones phone. There are no likes or comments, just video and photo sharing, making it more about the content users post than the communication aspect of social networks (even though there is a chat feature). Snapchat is also only available on phones (no computer viewing capabilities).