Blogging, twitting and facebooking (3/3)

In my previous posts you could read about Blogging and Twitting, now it is time to cover the topic of Facebook.

Facebook

Facebook is another social networking website which focus mainly on giving ability to quickly navigate from one's friend site to another. Users can join and create groups according to their interests or areas of expertise. Groups or single users' sites may be public or private. One of the most amazing thing about facebook is it's pictures albums and simple, very responsive images editor (which was one of the first web-based image editor available on that scale). You cannot customize your profile's page as on other social networking services like My Space (where you can, for instance, use HTML while on facebook only plain text customizations are allowed) and whole website is rather simple. Which is good, as most people consider simplicity as main factor of any website.

Brief history

First version of Facebook called Facemash was introduced in 2003, and a year later TheFaceBook was launched. They weren't very successful, however many companies and individual investors found the idea interesting and started to invest money into Facebook. $12.7 millions venture capital investment has been made just before start, and till 2007, Facebook total implied value was around $15 billion. On the other hand, year 2009 was first since the Facebook has been established that turned positive cash flow.

In 2007 many new features has been introduced - among them, better API and developers tools (called Facebook Platform) which allows other programmers to create their own applications. using Facebook engine. For instance there are over 30 applications to access Facebook available for iPhone users.

My experience

As I've already mentioned I'm not a big fan of social networking websites and I agree

with many opinions gathered in this article. On the other hand, I must admit that I have my own Facebook profile. I created it a while ago mainly to put some pictures from my Greece trip. In fact, I'm not sure where those pictures go as I cannot see them now. Well, I don't care, it wasn't best idea anyway.

Have you ever been using Facebook on a daily basis? Time to time? Or maybe you don't really care about those social networking websites? Let me know.

Blogging, twitting and facebooking (2/3)

First part of my presentation was about blogs and you can find it here: Blogging, twitting and fecebooking (1/3). This part would be about Twitter.

Twitting

Everyone knows what a blog is but how about this blue bird? Nowadays it is very popular and in short it is a weblog containing only very short entries (about 140 characters length) called a tweet. You can post it via web interface or you can use other tools, like external applications from your computer, phone or even by simply sending sms. It was established in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams and Biza Stonea.

It is quite amazing how does twitter grow during it's relatively short period of time - after 3 years it has approximately 6 billions users and... How many tweets? Well, here you would go to a twitter searching engine with requests for tweets with iPad tag, one of the most popular topic recently. Open the link above and do not close the page. Check it back after reading this post - you would be probably surprised how many people tweets on it per minute.

Who use twitter?

Twitter is used by so many people that it would be hard to list even most popular of them. Among the twitter users you can find: Barack Obama, Bruce Willis or Juesus Christ. How about the companies? As with blogs, companies' public relations departments have adopted twitter as another communication transmitter and among others you can find Google tweeting about their hottest news.

What is your experience?

Did you even heard about twitter? Did you know that we, in Poland, have our own similar service called BLIP (Bardzo Lubię Informować Przyjaciół)? Have you ever use twitter or blip?

For me, twitter is absolutely waste of time - I really do not need to know what had Bruce Willis ate in the morning. Blog can be informative, twitter on the other hand is like access to totally useless information or a link to real one. And did you know that twitter has it's own blog? How surprising...