From watching the video and reading the various articles about how much social media has changed over time, it’s kinda hard for me to imagine what it will be in the near, let alone far future. Some things such as the original dating site’s failure brought the idea for the successful MySpace which ideas were taken to produce different dating and social networking sites!
I myself used to use MySpace, but deleted that my senior year in HS when I got accepted into a university and made a Facebook (back when Facebook was only for college students). Facebook is easier to use because you don’t have the option to do things such as choose a song, background, different fonts, colors, etc. I’m an art major so I did enjoy getting to design my page on MySpace and sometimes wish we had the choice on Facebook to make it more personal, but I spent too much time consumed with making it look unique to even care about using it as a network. Now that I use a Mac which is much faster then the PC I used in HS maybe I’ll make a new one to show my artistic side. I also have a Twitter that I chose a personal color pallet and background picture which was very simple to do and I am learning how to widen my social network on twitter for hopefully things that could lead me further in my career. For social sites, there always has been, and will continue to be more and more I’m sure that people around the world use to connect to old, current, and new friends to stay in touch..we’ll just have to see what new ideas/layouts that come up with which people prefer.
LinkedIn is a media network strictly for business oriented things that I made an account for one of my other Mass Comm classes, but I haven’t even logged into it except for the first initial time I created it. I hope to explore and learn more about it now that I’m about to apply for some internships within the next year. LinkedIn is fairly new I believe, so it’s interesting to see how businesses are really starting to use the internet to find people, so I’m sure there will be more and more new sites for the working people world that are more specialty oriented such people in the design, marketing, restaurant, etc. fields of business.
For the dating side of the internet, I personally feel that is not “my cup of tea”. I do know many people that use them just for a random date/hook up reasons only on Match.com, and a few that have found their true love on other sites. The people that live next door to my parents met on EHarmoney.com and recommend it for anyone who is older but doesn’t feel like they are reaching out to meet new people. They said that if they passed each other on the street, they wouldn’t of taken a second look, but the fact they fell in love with each other based on personality traits made it so much better. If I move into a new city once I’ve graduated and can’t seem to make any new friends (which doesn’t worry me in the fact that I know a lot of people make social groups in their work) I may consider making one, but for now, I feel like if I’m meant to be with someone, I’ll meet them in my own time. I’ve heard of ridiculous other sites such as sugardaddy.com etc. that I can’t even imagine what other sites they will come up with for people to network ‘romantically’.
Craigslist.com is a site that I think is absolutely great. I put up an add to sublease my apartment last year and someone called me within three days of my post. It’s something so simple, yet genius. Sites that people can buy and sell on such is that, Amazon.com, and Ebay.com are all similar ideas that just vary a bit. Maybe in the future they’ll come up with something that’s possibly easier to browse through all the different items instead of having to scroll through pages and pages just reading various bits of text for the item.
Day to day we rapidly see new social media sites popping up that all give similar means of networking with others worldwide. There seems to always be something “bigger and better” and always will be, so it’s just a matter of time for the new site to come up with a ‘cooler’ way to communicate than the rest. The internet is turned into a scary, crazy thing that makes our world seem smaller than it already is!
((P.S. Cindy, sorry it’s late I didn’t know it was saved under just a draft rather than me pressing publish))
