A Social Media And Social Networking Essay Report.

Discuss about a Report on Social Media and Social Networking?

Social media and social networking sites has had a tremendous amount of positive as well as negative impacts on our culture, business, politics, entertainment and what not. Social networking sites are the most popular and most visited websites on the Internet. Not many people are left in the world that does not use any of the social networking sites available on the internet (Duggan and Brenner, 2013). Since Facebook has achieved such a huge popularity and acceptance among social networkers, lots of other networking websites have evolved and came into spotlight such as ‘Twitter’, ‘LinkedIn’, ‘Instagram’, ‘Ello’ and many more. Each of these websites has something unique to offer to its users. For example, ‘Facebook’ is especially known for connecting friends and family living all across the globe. ‘Ello’ specializes in giving an ad-free environment for socializing. Whereas, ‘Experience Project’ is dedicated to giving a platform to its users for sharing their personal experiences, stories, confessions, articles and blogs with others.

Facebook as a Social Network:

Facebook was introduced by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004 as a means of connecting with fellow students, colleagues, and relatives. Today, it has over 64 million active users participating and socializing all across the world. : Facebook offers a single platform where people can discover what is going on around the world, upload and share photos, videos and express their thoughts.

As a social networking website, Facebook is available on the internet in 37 distinct languages. It allows the users to create a personalized profile where they can upload their pictures and provide various levels of personal details according to their preference. They can keep in touch with friends and relatives by sending private messages or posting on their walls or timelines. It has experienced rapid growth in terms of many users and site development (Hampton, Goulet, Rainie and Purcell, 2011).

As a marketplace: Facebook is used as a marketplace to post advertisements. Members read and respond to classified ads.

Groups or communities: Facebook allows users to form groups and include members having a specific common interest so that they can interact, share news and discuss on that subject.

Events: Members can publish an event, invite guests, give relevant information as well as keep track of how many people are attending the event.

Public pages: Facebook offers to create, promote and publicize pages dedicated to a particular topic, or a celebrity or a book or movie, etc.

Facebook as a Social Network

Online Chat: This feature of Facebook allows the users to view which of their contacts are online and available to chat or instant messaging.

Apps: Facebook provides a lot of built-in apps for users such as video games and other entertainment apps in various topics. Recently, Facebook has launched its own Messenger App for Android and iPhone and other smartphone users to introduce personalized online chatting experience in Facebook environment.

HTTPS service: Facebook has included the option to browse videos, links and pages in ‘Secure’ mode so that there is least chance to encounter a virus attack. HTTPS loads all the security components such as login and registration while accessing site elements (Cheung, Chiu and Lee, 2011).

Privacy options: Facebook has a wide range of privacy options for its users where they can choose whether their posts will be visible to everyone or a specific group of connections.

Facebook focuses on technical scalability and swift performance. It gives a solid and comfortable user experience by implementing some of the smartest technologies with the presence of user-friendly API and application layers.

Notifications and News Feed: Facebook supports features that allow receiving instant notifications dynamically without having to refresh and load the entire web page. The News Feed is automatically loaded and populated with information while scrolling down across the page.

Being one of the most popular social networking website available in the internet, Facebook has some advantages as well as disadvantages.

Advantages:

Just by creating a profile on Facebook, people can connect and interact with their friends, family and relatives without any physical barriers as well as make new friends.

Facebook gives a huge platform to introduce and expand a business by connecting to everyone, promote their products, build a good relationship with customers as well as receive customer reviews and feedbacks for better customer service. Facebook fan pages can gain brand value for businesses (Doreian and Stokman, 2013).

Facebook is a source of news and information. It is a pool of knowledge filled with latest news and updates from various aspects. By subscribing or liking a page, it is possible to gather all kinds of news and info all around the globe.

Video chatting: Facebook provides personal video chatting experience incorporated within it. It can also be used a photo and video hosting site, store collection of albums and download anytime.

Disadvantages:

The most significant disadvantage of Facebook is it gives people the chance to create more than one profile at a time; as a result it is filled with lots of fake profiles mostly created by stalkers. These fake profiles can be used for bad purposes and cause unethical issues. Moreover, youngsters fall victim to these fake profiles and make friends with them which can bring a lot of troubles if they attempt to trust them.

What Facebook Offers

Another disadvantage is people tend to get addicted and spend too much time using Facebook as it has so many ways to know what their friends are up to, engage so many varieties of entertainment and game applications.

Ello is a social networking website with no advertisements. Ello has been termed as the ‘New Facebook’, ‘anti-Facebook’ ‘ad-free social network’ and lots more. The uniqueness that distinguishes Ello from any other social networking site is its promise of never selling information to third parties and providing an ad-free alternative (Hampton, Goulet, Rainie and Purcell, 2011).

Invitations: Ello is exclusive in its ways. It provides memberships to its users. It is invite-only. Interested people need to find out someone who uses Ello or request an invite in their site.

Real name policy: Unlike Facebook, Ello allows their users to use any name they want. It does not necessarily have to be their real name.

Ello uses a simple design for its website. Paul Budnitz’s had an innovative idea that completely differs with the main idea behind Facebook. Ello is made for artists and not for everyone. It is artsy and minimalist. It provides all the facilities of social networking minus the overflow of silly status updates every second and pop-up ads (Lin and Lu, 2011).

Account set-up: Ello just needs an email address to set up an account. Birth date or other details like gender are not required.

Friends and Noise: it is a cool feature to divide people into two groups. Ello limits updates from noisy ones.

Privacy: Ello offers a more promising privacy setting than Facebook. User information is not given to third parties. It has limited invitations and users can maintain anonymity.

Advantages:

Ello is achieving success at an early stage due to the innovative idea behind it.

Ello does not treat users as products. Most social networking sites track user activities and record them to show more relevant ads in future. But Ello does not do that.

Disadvantages:

Ello is still in beta testing, so bugs are expected. Moreover, it promises to remain ad-free for life and free of cost to the users but to collect revenues Ello offers to add special features to a user account with an exchange for a small fee.

One of its major drawbacks is many people do not yet use it. Everyone is still more familiar with Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, it does not let people find a specific person unless they know their user names.

Technical features of Facebook

‘Experience Project’ is all about sharing personal stories and life experiences. It is built around anonymity. It offers various online groups and communities where the members can submit their ‘confessions’ and ‘experiences’.

Users are allowed to start a story and upload photos as a typical tool for socializing where people can recognize themselves for what they have done. Experience Project has a lot of negative as well as positive experiences (Thuseethan and Kuhanesan, 2014). It revolves around the experiences and ideas of members.

This site includes following features:

Blogs, confessions: Allows writing personal blogs and anonymous confessions.

Trivia games: it allows users to play trivia games.

Has a search option to look for songs matching a particular mood. It also has features to add friends and private chatting. Experience Project is presently used by more than 15 million people.

It allows discovering people with similar stories and similar interests. Members with the same list of experience are connected automatically (Wang and Amin, 2013). Many people seek help and look for advice and suggestions online through this site. With this site, people have the freedom to share their views and express their thoughts to others and connect with people having common stories.

A lot of negative experiences can be seen on this website such as people who are battling depression or a divorce, but the idea around which this site was built serves its purposes correctly.

Conclusion

Today’s world is driven by social media and social networking. It is the modern form of socializing. Each of these websites has something different to offer. Although a lot of people who are tired of using Facebook switched to Ello for a change, Facebook is still going on with the highest number of users active on their site (Wodzicki, Schwämmlein, and Moskaliuk, 2012). A person can use all these sites for different purposes that they are designed to serve. To conclude, social media is still rising and has evolved to become an inevitable part of modern citizens.

Reference List

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Duggan, M., & Smith, A. (2013). Social media update 2013. Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Hampton, K., Goulet, L. S., Rainie, L., & Purcell, K. (2011). Social networking sites and our lives. Retrieved July 12, 2011 from.

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Lin, K. Y., & Lu, H. P. (2011). Why people use social networking sites: An empirical study integrating network externalities and motivation theory.Computers in Human Behavior, 27(3), 1152-1161.

Lin, K. Y., & Lu, H. P. (2011). Why people use social networking sites: An empirical study integrating network externalities and motivation theory.Computers in Human Behavior, 27(3), 1152-1161.

Thuseethan, S., & Kuhanesan, S. (2014). Positive and Negative Impacts of Facebook on University Students: Sri Lankan Perspective. IUP Journal of Information Technology, 10(3), 7.

Wang, F., & Amin, N. (2013). How Facebook impacts on young consumers' decisions on e-retailers.

Wodzicki, K., Schwämmlein, E., & Moskaliuk, J. (2012). “Actually, I Wanted to Learn”: Study-related knowledge exchange on social networking sites. The Internet and Higher Education, 15(1), 9-14.