What you should know about Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites

Social networking websites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have seen a tremendous gain in popularity in the past year. Even Oprah has begun to post on Twitter, as do all 3 local TV news stations. Whether or not you visit social networking websites, this article should help you learn more about the latest phenomenon.

In case you’re not familiar with these websites, social networking websites are a place that people can interact with others and upload pictures and video for other to see and comment about. They are a place where you can meet and interact with people who you know, and people that they know. Wikipedia defines a social networking service as a “service [which] focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.”

• MySpace reached it’s peak in 2006 as primarily a place that teens and singles designed their own web “space” where they can post photos and music, and interact with other people. But recently people have started using the more popular website, Facebook.

• Facebook is currently the largest worldwide online social network. Like MySpace it allows people to converse with friends and family members in an open or privacy restricted online community, and publish pictures, videos and links to other websites of interest. Facebook has lots of fun quizzes such as “What famous actor you look most like”, and share the results with your friends to comment on. It also has fan pages and group pages where you can follow businesses of interest, sports teams, and other organizations – and interact with people of similar interests. You can follow the Computer Techs Reno fan page. If you’ve got nothing better to do, Facebook can be fun and entertaining. Facebook can also be a timesink.

• My favorite social network is Twitter. Twitter is a unique social network that limits entries to 140 characters of text-only posts or “tweets”. To get by that limitation some people use link shortening services such as tinyurl.com or snipurl.com to post shorter links in tweets that direct readers to web pages that contain more information.

I primarily use Twitter to follow people and organizations in the technology industry that tweet technology related information. The limitation of 140-characters is helpful to me because it forces people to provide a short and to-the-point “headline” about what they are trying to communicate, and I can choose to follow a link (if provided) to get more information.

Some people tweet from their cell phones as a text message which is then transmitted to everybody that follows them – on the Twitter website, their cell phone or both. This is how information about the recent Iranian election riots first became known. I was among the first people to find out about Michael Jackson’s death because I was doing a live Twitter search for “Michael Jackson”, which updates public tweets every minute. Twitter is very useful if you want to follow news as it is happening.

People can make their tweets public where anyone can read them. One of my accounts is private, so that only the people that I selectively approve are allowed to view and follow my tweets. To make it interesting and useful, I only follow people who tweet interesting and informative things – and I do the same. I don’t follow people that frequently say something such as “I’m eating a ham sandwich”.

At the bottom of this article see the Twitter widget where you can see our recent Computer Techs Reno (CTreno) tweets, and follow us. Below that is the Computer Techs Reno Facebook fan box, showing our recent posts.

When joining a social network, be careful about adding friends to your network. Many services will offer to add friends if you give the website access to your email address book, then email an invitation to everybody in the list. I recommend adding friends one-by-one, and not giving a social network complete access to your entire address book.

For more information on the social networks of Facebook and Twitter, read PC World’s How to Avoid Facebook and Twitter Disasters