What are Facebook, Twitter & YouTube?
By Jerry Hume
Tuesday, November 03, 2009 at 5:09 p.m.
Read more: Local, Community
MARQUETTE -- Ten years ago the words Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube would probably mean nothing to you. But today these content sharing, social networking websites have saturated our everyday life.
Jon Mommaerts of Marquette was at first hesitant to log on to Facebook.com.
"I got into it because I had friends from college that continually emailed me that told me to get on it, get on it, get on it,” said Mommaerts, “and after several months I think there's enough people on it I finally got curious enough or pushed hard enough to actually sign up and get on it."
Jon's not alone. People 35 and older are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook.
Facebook is a website that 6 years ago didn't exist. Today it's behind only Google as the most popular website in the world.
Facebook and MySpace are both social networking websites. They provide the website, and you provide the content with your photo, information and anything else you want to share with others. In exchange, your friends and family share their photos, information and messages with you.
Facebook, with 300 million active users, is almost a requirement for college students.
"It's actually gives status updates on what you're doing in your life and you can use it to message people that you haven't seen in a while, or just keep in touch with people in general," said Michigan Tech Student Ryan Morrell-Peters.
Our own Vicky Crystal uses another social networking website, Twitter. It’s sort of like a blog about her job on the morning news.
"Twitter is a website where people can go on there and it's the opportunity to share just brief thoughts or brief tidbits of what's happening in your everyday life," said Vicky.
The other popular website that allows you to provide the content is YouTube. From the ridiculous, to the newsworthy, you'll find it all.
"YouTube is a video sharing site,” said N.M.U. Student Angela Oldgren. “I use it a lot because I like watching videos people make and really cool music videos and stuff."
But why are these websites so popular? According to N.M.U. Communications Professor Mark Shevy, unlike television, movies or any other medium, social networking websites make you, your friends and family the stars.
"What is it that we want? We form relationships with TV actors or even news personalities, but when we have our own friends and family out there as the content, we are even more attached than we normally would be," said Shevy.
And like television and movies, these websites are changing the way we operate as a society, for the better and worse.
