The Social Networks

 Facebook, Myspace, Twitter,  and Instagram are part of a large group of websites and applications called social networks which connects people all over the world through common interest and mutual friends. These social networking have similar functions but do not work the same and there are clear distinctions between how each social networking app works.

 Facebook connects people with their friends and and friend of friends. Anyone signed on to the site can write post on their own timeline or their friends' pages . It allows its user to add pictures, videos   and links to their post. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites, as of June Facebook claims to have 1.32 billion users. It's creation was also the subject as an Academy Award winning film, the Social Network.

 Myspace is a site that went through changes through out the years. It was created in 2003 and what arguable the most popular social networking sites until the rise of Facebook. At its height it had about 300 million users. On Myspace people connected with others by posting links on their bulletin board. It also had a lot of customization features and many users posted their art work and music to the site. However the difficultly of using the social networking site and the rise of Facebook, lead Myspace to re brand itself a couple of years back.

 Twitter is allows users to publish post and allows for the public to view them, similar to a blog. Unlike a blog however, only 140 characters can be posted. It was the first social networking site to use hash-tags, which users could use to find multiple post about one topic. Many organizations, politicians and celebrities use twitter to connect with the public. According to Twitter, there are about 271 million active users monthly and about 500 million tweets are sent each day.

 Instagram is a newer social networking site. Post consist of pictures that sometimes have a caption and in 2013, Instagram allowed users to post fifteen second videos. It launched in 2010 and has over 200 million users who post about 60 million photos a day according to Instagram. Like Twitter, it many of its users are organizations and celebrities who share pictures to connect with the public.