It’s almost impossible to think of the internet without social networks...

Sure there were places where you could create your own tacky webpage at the turn of the millennium and everyone you knew aged under 25 had their own Hotmail address but the internet was a very different place. It had a clear hierarchy in that the only worthwhile content on the internet was by the people and businesses who had the technical and monetary power to build the websites. That is, until the social networks came along.

I was quite late onto the social networking bandwagon. I only had chance to amass about five friends on Bebo (a website which I pronounce as bay-bo, much to the annoyance of my friends – bee-bo sounds much to chavvy for my tastes) and none at all on MySpace before I jumped ship to Facebook. I was on the biggest social network from relatively early on, definitely before the massive rush of everyone else my age and I found it so much better than Bebo or MySpace, mainly because you couldn’t apply a tacky theme to your page or have a module that automatically played terrible music where the visitor to your page would have to frantically look for where the music was coming from so it didn’t deafen them any more. But the most addictive thing about Facebook, which is still true today was the news feed. It seems so obvious now but Facebook was the first site to show you what your friends were doing without you having to specifically go to their page. Facebook invented the best thing in existence: a page that told you what all of your friends were doing. Something of pure brilliance!

Twitter’s brilliance is very similar, as that also shows you what everyone is doing but their angle rightly gives them their place as my favourite social network: celebrities. When I say that, I don’t mean it in the Britney or Beiber sense but rather interesting people with good opinions such as Stephen Fry, Charlie Brooker, Catlin Moran and the like. Twitter’s brilliance comes from the lack of friends on it. It’s simply a list of feeds. You can choose which ones to follow and people can follow yours too. It’s a place where its candidness and instant nature allows it to work really well for current events. I love going on it after watching a ‘big’ TV show such as Sherlock or Doctor Who to see what people have been saying about it.

Now, personally nowerdays I’m more of a lurker on social networks then a regular poster. On Facebook, this is mainly due to my hatred of people who post so much crap about every little occurrence to them and my own fear of not wanting to become such an invader into other people’s lives myself. On Twitter, my quietness is often down to a lack of witty things to say. Twitter, with all of it’s celebrities and funny people is a place for true insight and opinion I find, something very broadsheet compared to the tabloid-like Facebook, complete with its scandals, bad jokes and, of course, revealing photos.