Blog: Social networking sites

We live in the age of social media, and it is inevitable that there will be various platforms that offer different services and differentiate themselves in order to draw you in to their platform.

Facebook is the most active social media platform in the world, and that didn't happen by keeping their offerings one-dimensional. They continuously updated since its creation, making the site and the mobile application platform smoother and visually appealing, expanded from only updating statuses to being able to upload photos and videos, and created a timeline where all of a user's relevant activities are posted by date. It is becoming harder to think of things that you can't do on Facebook as it continues to improve.

Twitter serves a more niche market, catering to a group of users who tend to spend more time on social media, as the each tweets are very short-lived and can be missed if you don't go on Twitter every couple of hours. My first impression is that the character limit on tweets can put off people that find it hard to keep their opinions short but it may be a plus for others that don't have the patience to read longer walls of text all the time.

Youtube is a rather different platform compared to others, as people don't necessarily have active interactions with one another. In short, people only go on it to watch videos but its purpose and usefulness is impossible to summarize in that broad sentence. It created video content creators, new ways to watch highlights of sports, TV shows and even serves as a place to discover new musicians and watch music videos. The fact that the site also places a plethora of recommended videos for you on the homepage based on your watch history makes it easier for users to discover new things of interest and spend more time as well.

Finally, Snapchat is the most "personal" way to connect and communicate with people out of all of these social media apps. Users can "snap" pictures to one another and this allows for people to be able to send different content to different people. Although you can post "stories" that post content which can be seen by all of your friends, the individual snaps make it very distinct from other social medias  and much more personal.