JULY 2012 - FACEBOOK & TWITTER

Social networking is conquering the Web, and the two leaders in this growing market are Facebook and Twitter. Each site has built communities of millions of users and developers in just a few short years, and they are fighting each other to become the top destination for Web users looking to share information with friends and colleagues.

Facebook is a social networking website where users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Users can create profiles with photos, lists of personal interests, contact information and other personal information. Communicating with friends and other users can be done through private or public messages or a chat feature. Users can also create and join interest groups and "like pages", many of which are maintained by businesses and organizations as a means of advertising.

Twitter is both a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read other users' messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default; however senders can restrict message delivery to their friends list. Users may subscribe to other author tweets—this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.

Users can group posts together by topic or type by use of hashtags — words or phrases prefixed with a #. Similarly, the letter "d" followed by a username allows users to send messages privately. Finally, the @ sign followed by a username is used for mentioning or replying to other users.

Facebook is clearly the most popular social networking site. Based on a study in March, 2012, Facebook got 7 billion visits in March, followed by Twitter with 182 million visits.

As Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks have quickly become an integral part of the online culture, with them comes a whole new array of potential security threats. Social networking is built on the idea of sharing information openly and fostering a sense of community. Unfortunately, an online network of individuals actively sharing their experiences and seeking connections with other like-minded people can be easy prey for hackers bent on social-engineering and phishing attacks. It's important to be aware of the threats, and to maintain a healthy skepticism in your online interactions.

The best rules for any social networking site are:

• Be careful what you share. As a general rule, refrain from posting things online that you will regret later. Odds are good that someone, someday, will stumble across it, and it may come back to haunt you

• Keep your audience in mind. Don't ever post anything online that you aren't comfortable with everyone seeing, because eventually they probably will

• Control what you can. Facebook and Twitter do offer privacy controls that restrict or deny access to information. As these are social networking sites designed for sharing information, many of the settings are open by default. It is up to you to access the Privacy Settings and configure the options as you see fit.

For more information on each site, visit their Help pages:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/help

Twitter: https://support.twitter.com/

For Step-by-Step tutorials for Facebook, Twitter and many other social network sites, check out this site:

http://www.gcflearnfree.org/socialmedia