Social Networking Sites

Facebook is a social networking service and Web site launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of July 2011, Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends, and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Facebook users must register before using the site. Additionally, users may join common-interest user groups, organized by workplace, school or college, or other characteristics, and categorize their friends into lists, e.g. "People From Work", or "Really Good Friends". The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the United States to help students get to know each other. Facebook allows any users who declare themselves to be at least 13 years old to become registered users of the Web site.
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors. In July 2005, News Corporation acquired Myspace and its parent company Intermix Media for $580 million. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009. Since then, the number of Myspace users has declined steadily in spite of several redesigns. As of October 2011, Myspace was ranked 103rd by total web traffic.

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as "the SMS of the Internet." Twitter Inc., the company that operates the service and associated website, is based in San Francisco, with additional servers and offices in San Antonio, Boston, and New York City.

Google+ is a social networking and identity service, operated by Google Inc.The service launched on 28 June 2011, in an invite-only "field testing" phase. The following day, existing users were allowed to invite friends, who were over 18 years of age, to the service to create their own accounts. This was suspended the next day due to an "insane demand" for accounts. on the sixth of August, each Google+ member had 150 invites to give out, but on 30 September 2011, Google+ was opened to everyone 18 years of age or older without the need for an invitation. After Google+ went public, users registered to Google with an age under 18 were unable to sign up for Google+. Google plans to open up Google+ to all users over the ages of 13 after proper safety features are added. Google+ integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, and introduces new services Circles, Hangouts and Sparks. Google+ is available as a web site, and will be available as a desktop application,[citation needed] and is already available as a mobile application, but only on the Android and iOS operating systems. Google has launched an API platform for developers. Sources such as The New York Times have declared it Google's biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook, which had over 800 million users in 2011.

I personally thinks all these social, media web-sites are huge waste of time. I use Facebook once in a while to say Happy Birthday to my real-life friends before i actually call them afterwards. I don't know anyone who uses MySpace anymore. As long as I know people stop using it because of it's overload of graphics and music on peoples' profiles. Twitter is a dumn idea. People constantly twitting what they are doing at a particular moment of time and others are reading it like there is nothing else to read. For me it looks like text-messaging between people who don't know each other. I don't use Twitter and i had to create an account just for this class purposes. Google+ is a parody on Facebook!!