What does Facebook (and Twitter) have that Xanga didn't?

As technology and social networking mature and adapt to various societies today, we almost always forget about the old networks immediately as the newest one comes along. Popularity of one social network is usually overshadowed by a newer more visually pleasing social network. As I was sitting on my computer one day looking at my facebook and tweeting on my iPhone, I thought to myself what ever happened to Xanga? Ahh yes, Xanga, the poetically written blog accompanied by the latest indie song you have playing as your background music, and the website where one blogger could visit random blogger's blogs for hours and hours. The personality of your xanga directly represented you, the blogger, or so one would think. Can you personalize your Facebook? Maybe. But I don't know how quite yet. On a Xanga page, you would have your list of viewers where you could tally up how many times this person had viewed your page. The majority of the time you had to accept the person to FOLLOW you (hence the reference to Twitter). You would seem like a cool blogger if people you kind of knew where following you. By kind of knowing someone I'll use the example..Timmy, the boy that you went to the same church with and lived 25 minutes away from. Although this FRIEND REQUEST (Facebook reference, you're welcome) seems to sound like Facebook in a way, Xanga just told you that the person was following your blog and they did not have any safety precautions to it. But safety a few years ago wasn't really the issue to young budding teens who were as obsessed with Xanga as they were with Instant Messaging. Once you think about it you do realize that yes, it was that long ago. So why was Xanga so hot and then suddenly so not? Well, to back up my hypothesis on Facebook being far better than Xanga, I set up my own Xanga account (again) to see why no one really uses Xanga anymore. First off, registering for your Xanga is-to say the least- a complicated order. When your favorite book, food, tv show, movie, place, color, where you attend school, and your religion are all optional on Facebook, Xanga made me feel like I was applying for an eHarmony subscription. Secondly, uploading pictures onto Facebook is idiot-proof. I can even upload them from my smart phone. It is just user friendly. Xanga on the other hand requires the use of PhotoBucket. I wasn't sure how to use it before when I was 13 and, sure enough I still am clueless when it comes to uploading pictures onto Xanga. Thirdly (and the most important) is that I really find the most important thing about having a social networking profile (or two) is the safelty of the network you are working with. Xanga was about as vulnerable to the internet as MySpace, which freaked me out the whopping one month I had a MySpace and I deleted it. You can have tons of random people from all over the world commenting on your posts- some of which are just weird. Facebook lets it's users ask and send requests for everything, even if it's a virus floating around Facebook. And as for Twitter, its a Xanga that allows 250 words and icons, pictures, and no one cares about what is on your profile. From my personal experiences a good quote will usually work. To top it off you can follow celebrities and see what they are up to. So, overall...what happened to Xanga is that people found better ways to blog, keep up and in touch with friends, and protect themselves better than Xanga allowed them to.

Top Three Twitter Apps for an Iphone user

Twitter is rapidly becoming one of the most popular social networking sites out there. I absolutely love Twitter. Twitter is my comic relief on a daily basis. I'm probably addicted. I tweet everywhere:while walking to class, sitting in the union, in class, in long meetings, and wherever else I deem necessary. I even tweet in the shower. #DontJudgeMe That's just a little Twitter humor for you all. I am able to effectively tweet and update my account on Twitter by using applications. Well, today I wanted to share with you some great twitter apps for the iPhone. I wanted to share with you the applications that have worked best for me.

1) EchoFon

Echofon is by far my favorite application. I have tried many apps before but this one is perhaps the best. It a

llows you to do so much. My favorite feature is the mute option. In case you don't know what the mute option is, it allows you to temporary silence one of your followers. You might ask "why would you want to mute someone?" Well, there are certain followers that annoy me but I do not want to "unfollow" them, instead I just mute them until I feel like being bothered with them again. EchoFon also includes the push notification feature. The ap

p will send me a notification whenever I receive a direct message, a mention, or a retweet. It helps me to keep up with everything. It is a wonderful app for an afforable cost: FREE!

2) Twitbird

I really really like Twitbird. It's also another free application for Twitter. I especially like Twitbird because it allows you to be creative and change the layout of your timeline as well as your profile. Twitbird also allows your to change your profile picture without making it appear small unlike other apps. It is much easier to edit and transform your profile than it is on the internet or any other app. I am able to alter my background with this app. As you can see in my picture on the right, I can upload my own picture and save them as a background.Twitbird is one of the few applications that read your tweets aloud for you. This can come quite in handy if you are driving or preoccupied. It is a great feature for someone who is blind or have poor vision. This app does not have push notifications but itorganizes my Retweets, Direct Messages, and Mentions into separate folders. I never miss a tweet with twitbird.

3) Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a pretty nice app as well. As you can tell, I have many applications for Twitter installed on my phone. I use Hootsuite as my backup app in case my other applications start to crash. Sometimes, there is an error in an application which may cause it to fail. That doesn't happen often though. I like Hootsuite because it is very easy to navigate. Hootsuite places everything in to separate folders. Not only does it use organize my Twitter account but it organizes my Facebook account. I really like that feature of Hootsuite. It allows me to easily navigate between Twitter and Facebook without a problem.

These applications that I listed above are my personal favorites. These apps should be most helpful to any iPhone user.

-Brittany Dukes

Having One Of Those Days? Blog About It.

Have you ever been so frustrated with someone or something and wanted to express your feelings about it, but did not want to be the person who complained about everything on your Facebook or Twitter? Well I was that person after one of the girls in my sorority broke my nose two weeks ago while practicing for derby days. I was so mad and did not feel any better after calling my mom and talking to her about it for an hour. I knew my president was my friend on Facebook and followed me on Twitter so I could not put anything about my sister on either one of those accounts. So as I was thinking about my blog topic, I stumbled across Tumblr. Which for those of you who live under a social network rock and don’t know what Tumblr is, click here http://www.tumblr.com/ . I realized, duh Sloan you can obviously blog about it and you won’t get in trouble about it, because 99.9% of your sorority will not think to look on a blog.

As soon as I finished registering online, I started reading other people’s blogs and was instantly hooked. Tumblr is unlike any Social Network I use. Facebook is full of kids and people I graduated high school with. I really don’t want those people to read about my thoughts. I also found that there are so many ways to use Tumblr. According to the Tumblr website “The average Tumblr user creates 14 original posts each month, and reblogs 3. Half of those posts are photos. The rest are split between text, links, quotes, music, and video.” Which in my opinion is awesome, because you can read other people's blogs that are interested in the same things as you are. Also if you stumble across a blog that is extremely boring to you, you don’t have to read it.

When you create your profile, you have so many options of themes to choose from. Also, if you are unlike me and are very creative and artistic you can create an original theme. I unfortunately have a very hard time drawing so I chose one that was pre-made. Unlike Facebook and Twitter you can have your own domain name so that if your friends who don’t have Tumblr want to read your blogs, you can send them the link to your Tumblr page by using your domain name. I made mine easy so that it wasn’t hard for my not so smart friends to find me (www.sloan1234.tumblr.com). My favorite part of Tumblr is that there is an app for that,duh. I just bought an Iphone three weeks ago and it never leaves my hands so having a Tumblr app makes it really easy to update my blog. So when I’m sitting in class and my teacher says something that I don’t agree with or when they say something funny, I can obviously update it to Facebook, Twitter and now Tumblr. I also forgot to mention something that I feel like everyone would like about Tumblr, whether you live under a rock or you are president of ASB, Tumblr is free. You don’t pay for storage, bandwidth or even the advance features like the full theme source codes and group blogs. Next time you are having one of those days where you just need to let it all out, blog about it.

The 10 Most Innovative Web Companies

The web has completely changed how people interact, how business is done and basically the day-to-day life. To be influential in this economy, it is almost imperative to operate an efficient and consumer-friendly website. If you expect to be a top company without a website, you are bound to be missing a large percentage of the market share. These top 10 companies have created websites that have taken off at extraordinary paces and have many other companies following in their footsteps.

1. Twitter

In 2009, when Twitter began, they had around 20 million users and today they have more than 200 million! When the company first began, they were unsure of how they were going to collect money. They allowed users to sign up for free with no extra charges added. When the economy began to take an upturn, Twitter created ads that companies could buy that would cost them around $100,000 to purchase.

2. Google

Google has seemed to stay at the top of their game ever since they entered the web economy. They have been ever expanding ever since creating the Google website with all different things that users can "play" with. With all of these applications that users were freely allowed to use and view, it was also unsure for Google how they were actually going to make their money in the beginning. Google then created AdSense and AdWords for companies to be able to advertise and show up in their search results. In addition, Google also created Google Instant which has a 98% adoption rate. There are approximately 2 million searches a second and 3 billion per day.

3. Zynga

Zynga is the company that created the FarmVille game for Facebook. With their 400 million dollar return from the game, they decided to create CityVille which was released in January. After only a month, CityVille had 100 million users, making it the number one app on Facebook. Presently, the Zynga companies net worth is estimated to be $7 to $9 billion. At the rate that this company is going, they can only see the bright future ahead.

4. Netflix

Netflix began by their mail-in DVD business. In order to block out the competition, Netflix began streaming services in the United States and in Canada. From 2010, it is estimated that Netflix profited approximately $2.2 billion in revenues. Netflix has more than 20 million subscribers which has in turn basically over-run BlockBuster.

5. Foursquare

Defending its competitive position, growing exponentially, and making check-ins a must-use marketing tool for major brands. Astronaut Douglas Wheelock earned the NASA Explorer Badge when he checked in while orbiting the Earth; a story that reflect Foursquare's meteoric rise. The company now hosts around 7.5 million users, a 50% increase from September 2010.

Most significantly, the company has steamed ahead in the face of growing competition from Gowalla, Google Latitude, Loopt, and especially Facebook Places. It launched a brand new version of the service in March, unveiled an innovative merchant platform, and has some half billion check-ins in the last year alone.

6. Tumblr

For turning stray thoughts into big business. The New York based almost Twitter except without the "how many characters you can use" restriction, is drawing around 30,000 new members each day. More impressively, around 4 billion page views per month. In November, it scored between $25 million and $30 million from investors, bringing its total past $40 million.

7. Crimson Hexagon

For developing a revolutionary way to monitor and measure Twitter chatter. Crimson Hexagon began at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science but has grown into the prime analytics tool for HP, Microsoft, and CNN, which use the website to gauge public perceptions.

The company monitors the Web, tracking and learning the specifics of what people are saying in social media in real-time. Beyond the positive-or-negative analysis of keyword and semantic searches and with as much as 97 percent accuracy.

8. Stocktwits

Created the CNBC of the digital age. On this site, live streams are pulled from Facebook and Twitter; recently acquired service Abnormal Returns culls the best financial news stories from the Internet; weekly Webinars and video market recaps are offered; and StockTwits.tv features original programming around the clock. In other words, StockTwits has become an indispensible real-time financial tool for the social media age. It also boasts more than 300,000 monthly unique hits.

9. Microsoft

Reinvented their search market competition with Bing, the only REAL Google challenger left. Thanks to strategic partnerships with Kayak, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook, Bing has begun nipping away at Google's market share and kept competition from becoming a monopoly. Earlier this month, Bing became the second most-popular search engine worldwide.

10. Conaco Productions

Kept Conan relevant long after he was yanked off the air. Even after his unfortunate departure from NBC, Conan O'Brien kept his brand red-hot thanks to a squad of 8 full-time Team Coco Digital staffers running his social media like pros.

The millions of views on YouTube, hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook, and millions of followers on Twitter. To hype his TBS show's November debut, Conan's team also started a 24-hour live webcast of the production, built fan pages on Flickr and Tumblr and launched a bright orange Conan blimp, which spotters could check into on Foursquare.

Facebook Etiquette

Facebook is a popular social network that was created by Mark Zuckerberg and his friends in 2004. Originally, it was created for college students, and one had to be invited in order to become a member of Facebook. Today it has evolved into a social network for old classmates, high school networks, college networks, family members, celebrities, businesses, etc. Facebook has many functions ranging from putting what is on your mind at the moment into a little box to messaging your long lost friend. Unfortunately, people have started to turn away from the basics of Facebook and started to use it for the wrong reasons.

Many people have refrained from using Facebook as much as they use to because they have become tired of logging on to see bullying, prolonged rants, drama, and the reoccurring “o, woe is me” type statuses. They feel better going to other social networks such as, Twitter. So I decided to come up with a list of suggestions that will serve as “Facebook Etiquette” to keep more users on Facebook.

• Make a status describing your mood, location, task/hobby, or state without giving too much information
• Have a positive vibe. DO NOT bully, make negative references, post inappropriate comments, etc.

• Be respectful. Only post pictures and videos that you would be fine with your parents and loved ones seeing.

• Use Facebook for what it is, a social network. Stay in contact with your friends, classmates, old teachers, family members, co-workers, etc. Do not hold conversations online because that is what texting and pop-up chats are for.
• DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT put your whole life on your profile and newsfeed. Use the privacy settings to maximum. They are there for a reason. Ex. Your birthday along with your location, mother’s maiden name, and email address is enough to access your bank account.

• Only accept friend requests from people that you know. Having mutual friends is not enough anymore. The account may even be spam or a Trojan virus.
• Be very careful with your log in information. Make your password very unique to ensure privacy.
• Do not choose the “keep me logged in” option on a public computer or on any computer other than your own to ensure that no one can hack your account.
• Only post what you are comfortable with or what you feel you can handle feedback on. Be prepared for comments and/or subliminal messages on an opinionated post, relationship status, check-in, video, etc.
• Avoid clicking on random links on your newsfeed. This leads to spam accounts or spam just being posted on your wall. I.e. those shoe advertisements and model pictures everyone has been seeing recently.

In clarification, these suggestions are not listed in any order of importance. There are strictly things that I have thought of and things that I have been wanting to state. Also, there are more tips, but I only decided to list ten to refrain from repeating something. To sum this all up, just please use Facebook for social purposes within ethical reasoning and not so much for entertainment purposes. Remember, Facebook can pretty much show who you are as a person, display every bit of your personal information, and tell your every move ONLY IF YOU ALLOW IT TO!

Add Don't Follow

How many time a day do you hear a sentence that started with “Well I was on Facebook and I..”? If you are a college student you hear this at least twenty times a day. If you are like me, you have had a Facebook ever since you were in high school. Not many times do you hear “Well I saw on Twitter..”. If you were to take a poll at this moment around the Ole Miss campus about which Social Network students would prefer, I would guarantee the majority of the students would pick Facebook. In my opinion the main reason I would chose Facebook over Twitter any day is for the multiple ways you can “stalk” your friends. On Facebook you can view your friend’s interests, favorite television shows, favorite music, their religious preferences, political preferences and where they are from. When you want to get to know someone better you would more than likely look at their Facebook page rather than their Twitter page, which only shows what that certain person is thinking or doing at that moment.

Twitter to me just is a bunch of people updating their status’s, which all of my friends already do on Facebook. The only upside to Twitter is that you can “follow” your favorite celebrities and get to find out what they are thinking and/or doing at that moment. Unlike Facebook, on Twitter there is no way to instantly “chat” with your friends that are online. The only way to communicate with them via Twitter is to “tweet” at them and hope they see it in time to respond. Also the only pictures of the person whose profile you want to look at is the pictures they have as their profile picture or the ones they choose to tweet at the moment. Twitter only allows you to upload one picture at a time, you can never have photo albums like you can on Facebook.

Another main reason that Facebook is better than Twitter is that on Facebook you can send messages to multiple times at once. In my sorority that is how we communicate to our chapter and get out important messages that need to be read immediately. We all know sorority girls are more likely to check their Facebook rather than their Ole Miss webmail.

I was on Twitter the other day, and I wanted to leave my roommate who is in Washington D.C. doing an internship this semester a video telling her that i miss her. I went on Caroline’s profile and searched for about ten minutes trying to find the upload video/picture button, but to my surprise there was not one. So I had to log off and log onto Facebook just to upload a video onto her profile. You would think that Twitter would want to competed with Facebook by having more options to choose from, but they do not. For people like me who like to know a lot about their friends, Facebook is the way to go. So don’t “follow” people just because it is cool at the moment, but keep “adding” to your profile on Facebook.

Tweeting

I recently signed up for a Twitter account and became instantly addicted. For me Twitter is more simple and easy to use than Facebook. Your profile can only be a few words about yourself along with you location if you choose. When you "tweet" you only have 140 characters to say what you want with the ability to add your location. The tweets are intended to be short on -the-go blog posts. Like Facebook you can tag followers by using @. You can tag trends using #. For example, the other night while watching the 20/20 Charlie Sheen interview I tagged #tigerblood while watching the show. When clicking on the "#tigerblood" one can view every other tweet with this tag.

Instead of having friends where you have the ability to view each others profiles, Twitter uses followers. This way you can follow a person's posts, such as rap artist Gucci Mane, without them having to view your posts. Being able to follow celebrities is fun and informative. It is also fun to follow your friends and tag them in tweets. "RT" is a common sighting on tweets. This stands for re-tweet. If you tag a celebrity in a tweet and say something they like or enjoy they may RT you for all of their followers to see. I regularly tag Chad Ochocinco hoping to be RTed by him or receive an invitation to hang out with him in Miami as he has done with some followers in the past.

I live life in the fast lane and Twitter is the perfect social network for my lifestyle. Facebook is too busy with too much extra information. Twitter combines Facebook statuses and wall posts (the only cool things about Facebook) getting straight to the point. If you are interested in Twitter but can't pull away from Facebook's death grip you can always have your tweets synced through Facebook.

Facebook vs. Twitter

I recently created a Twitter account about three weeks ago mainly because all my friends were going on and on about how awesome it was. Honestly, I don't see anything awesome about it. How can I tell someone about myself in just a short amount of sentences. I tried to create my biography for my Twitter profile and it told me that the biography was too long. Really? I feel that I am a pretty awesome girl for my biography just to be only five to ten sentences long. Face book gives me a chance to share much more information about myself and my personality and show who I really am. It gives me a chance to show my friends and family the fun and somewhat wild side of me. Another reason why I feel that Face book is better than Twitter is because I value the time I spend connecting with my friends especially now since I'm attending a college that is two hours away from my hometown. Since I started Face book, I don't even use my email or instant messaging anymore. Although Face book can ruin relationships it can also build relationships. Once again I can use the example of me being away from home as an example. My relationship with my friends from back home has actually grown stronger because we write on each other's wall from time to time and we in-box each other to get the update on our crazy lives.