A BEGINNERS GUIDE to SOCIAL NETWORKING

MySpace is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California, US,My Space is not their space anymore ? Article on the move to Beverly Hills. Retrieved March 16, 2007. where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media, owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006.MySpace, America's Number One According to comScore, MySpace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly unique visitors.http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com+TWITTER.com/?metric=uv MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30% of its workforce in June 2009; the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006, in the Netherlands.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

The 140-character limit on message length was initially set for compatibility with SMS messaging, and has brought to the web the kind of shorthand notation and slang commonly used in SMS messages. The 140 character limit has also spurred the usage of URL shortening services such as tinyurl, bit.ly and tr.im, and content hosting services, such as Twitpic and NotePub to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.

Since its creation in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter has gained notability and popularity worldwide. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet" since the use of Twitter's application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.

Twitter emphasized their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?".http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/11/whats-happening-a-lot-says-twitter-coo/http://blog.twitter.com/2009/11/whats-happening.html Twitter is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis. Although estimates of the number of daily users vary because the company does not release the number of active accounts, a February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest-growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, Zimbio of 240 percent, followed by Facebook with an increase of 228 percent. However, only 40 percent of Twitter's users are retained.

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University."Founder Bios", Facebook. Retrieved July 31, 2009.

The website's membership was initially limited to Harvar...