Twitter, Facebook or Blog?

First there was blogging that took the world wide web by storm. Arguably a descendant of homepage clan of (now defunct) Geocities, blogs enabled internet users to easily create their presence in WWW and express themselves. Beside the simplicity and ease of use, the key foundation of blogs is the ability to have fans and through that – to build a hyper-link network of friends and people that share common interest.

Thus was born Social Networking phenom which is closely linked to the popularity of terms such as Web 2.0. A ‘new’ internet is borne.

Then other social networking sites such as MySpace Beauty and the Beast trailer and Friendster were born. They were very popular especially among teenagers and celebrities. However, from a dorm room in Silicon Valley, a newer site Facebook came to prominence. Given its lack of customisation options, it was not the obvious choice for teenagers. However, Facebook’s stroke of genius lies in its decision to open up third party developers to develop plethora of apps for Facebook. Together with its own brand of HTML, anybody can develop their own quizzes and more… very soon Facebook became a household internet name.

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What sets FB apart is its business-friendly approach – they make it very easy for businesses to set up custom pages – for free. And more crucially – the ease for businesses to advertise on Facebook – with complete control on the targeting of viewers, on-the-fly editing of advertising and ability to start, pause or stop a campaign.

Out of the blue (pun not intended), came Twitter to prominence in 2006 and a short 3 years later millions of internet users became addicted to this SMS-like brevity of Twitter. The success of Twitter (which is founded by co-founder of a podcasting company Odeo) surprises many media gurus because Twitter does not offer anything much except updating statuses. Anybody can do that right?

The Cycle (aka The Devil’s Ground) dvdrip Becoming Jane Again much of the success of Twitter is the decision to let third party developers use Twitter and make their own applications. So much so that it was said the majority of Twitter user never actually visited Twitter homepage after registration of account. That is also the problem with Twitter because they have not been able to figure out how to make money out of the service. However, a leaked internal document in Feb 2009 indicated that the company ambition is to have 1 billion users which will then make the service a major internet traffic controller which ‘obviously is a serious business’.

The question now is: which social networking sites that you use? Do you have accounts on all 3 – which admittedly I do. But do you spend your time on all 3? – obviously not a practical approach.

Personally, I spend more time on FB rather than Twitter. However, recent changes by Facebook is alienating users. Somehow when I visited my FB wall recently, I find it swamped with less-useful entries. You know what I mean? Can’t really put my finger to what it was yet though – but that is the feeling I get and that’s enough disincentive to check out the site.

I’ve never been a chatter, so Twitter is not for me. To get the best out of Twitter, you need to check the status regularly or you will miss out on the conversation. Unless of course you are a user of always-on handsets like iPhone or Blackberry.

Blogging? Occassionally yeah.. well I blog here but my entries come in spurts. I will try to write more often though. Sorry boss.