The debate is bound to rage on: Which social networking giant is really the best? Some will prefer to Tweet, others prefer Farmville; tastes will depend on whoever you associated yourself with. However, with Twitter having recently celebrated its 20th billionth tweet – just days after Facebook notched up its 500th millionth member, here are some interesting facts about the two dominant leaders in social networking.
Facebook
Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg – whilst he was studying a Psychology course at Harvard University. In 2006, Zuckerburg rejected a $1billion takeover offer from Yahoo. One year later, he sold a 1.6% stake to Microsoft for £117million. This year, figures suggest that Facebook is estimated to make $1billion. Users post videos, pictures, status updates and pictures on their own personal profiles. They connect with their friends via Facebook Chat and can have total control on who has access to personal information. Facebook makes most of its money by targeting advertising to certain individual’s likes and dislikes. Statistics suggest that Facebook users will spend around eight billion minutes on the site every day, and they send about a billion messages via Facebook chat. It is almost impossible to tell whether famous people are using the site – fan pages are more likely to pop up. Recently, a tribute page to the UK’s most wanted man, Raoul Moat was set-up. ‘RIP Raoul Moat You Legend!’ attracted 30,000 fans and received serious condemnation from David Cameron. It has since been removed. A campaign to get the 1992 song ‘Killing in the Name’ by Rage against the Machine was successful in December 2009 for the coveted prize of Christmas No.1. It beat ‘The Climb,’ by UK X-Factor winner Joe McElderry, in a bid to put an end to Simon Cowell’s domination of the Xmas No.1.
MY VIEW OF FACEBOOK: I joined Facebook back in July 2007, after being sent a friend recommendation. Honestly, I didn’t think it would catch on, I hadn’t even heard of it before then. However, I spend a load of time on Facebook and despite receiving some criticism of late – some of it deserved, it will remain king of the social networking world in my view.
Twitter
Twitter was created in 2006 by work buddies Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey. It started initially as a side project to a blogging website. There is no source of revenue so far for Twitter, with many waiting to see how it will generate profit. People write short updates called ‘Tweets,’ of 140 characters or less. These are posted to your profile/blog and sent to all of your followers. In 2007, about 5,000 tweets were sent a day, with that increasing to 300,000 messages per day in 2008. Famous celebrities who regularly tweet for their millions of fans include Jamie Olivier, Alan Carr, Dannii Minogue, Amanda Holden, Tony Blair, Kaya Scodelario, Stephen Fry, Lily Allen and Barack Obama.
MY VIEW OF TWITTER: I joined Twitter last October, as it was an expected requirement of my first year Journalism course at The University of Northampton. To be honest, I rarely use it, although I will pop on from time-to-time to see what my friends and celebrities I’m following, and post the occasional updates, normally about this website. Twitter is not my favourite site, but is a nice back-up to have, should I require it and it is one hundred times better than my MySpace account, which I closed down this summer due to lack of activity.
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