Check Out Social Networking Sites

Nowadays, networking plays a vital role. It is now possible to know other people who are on the other side of the world without actually meeting them in person. We now have what we call online profiles where we put our name, location, hobbies, age, and other information about ourselves. These sites where we could post profiles about ourselves are called Social Networking Sites.

According to statistics, Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are some of the most popular Social Networking Sites. All of them offer the features of uploading pictures on your profile and apps (applications) you can put to make your profile a little bit more interesting. Yet, as a user of these SNs, I have compared all of them so that we can see the differences.



Friendster was the very first one that I used. When I first started using it, you cannot add apps (applications) to your profile, or update your status (What are you doing right now?) or receive activity updates from friends. But Friendster has the feature called "Who's Viewed My Profile?" where one could see and check who looks at their profile and the number of profile views you get every month. Myspace and Facebook do not have this profile views tracker. Just like MySpace, one can also customize your profile page by making your own designs for your page backgrounds and layouts or you can choose to use some of Friendster's templates. Friendster has a CSS editor for advanced users. Users can also create blogs using Friendster blogs which are only available for Friendster users.




MySpace on the other hand, does not have the "Profile Views" feature but when you edit your profile, you can exactly see every change you make, may it be on the layout or background colors and font changes. MySpace also offers users a MySpace blog and a MySpace email address which you can only access every time you open your MySpace account. Like Facebook, it also has live chat where you can see who among your friends are online.



Facebook started as a social networking site where only college students with a valid school email address could post a profile. It is the new evolution of Friendster and Myspace. Facebook is different from the SNs I mentioned above because in Facebook, users have walls where you can write to (compared to 'Page Comments' in MySpace and Friendster) and you cannot customize your page. But there are apps that you can add and games you can play to keep you entertained. It was from Facebook that I first saw apps where you could actually purchase something (electronically, but by using your actual money) and send them as gifts to your friends.