Monday, June 11, 2012 By Courtney Marcil
Twitter's bird logo is the app symbol on a website now more oftentimes used by students than Facebook. - Creative Commons image by spainvictorcompany
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With millions of social networking websites available today, time on the computer can be used leisurely rather than just for work. Most teens have found their way on to popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Facebook has become overwhelmingly the most popular of the all, with what BusinessInsider.com says “600 million people...each month, and that half come back every day.” Although Twitters numbers are nowhere close to Facebooks, students have started to switch websites, finding new and more diverse ways to share with others.
Although many students belong to multiple websites, myself included, there is usually one website I enjoy spending time on over the rest. With so much to do on the internet, one website can’t stay on top for long. Corny, sappy, worldly, or ironic Facebook status updates can only be interesting for so long. This is where students have turned to Twitter.
Twitter lets people express thoughts, experiences, actions, or jokes as many times a day as they want. Each tweet is only allowed to be 160 characters, eliminating boring drawn out stories. With short tweets, it’s easy to follow up on your friends, enemies,celebrities, or themed pages.
Twitter’s character count creates a creative challenge for users to fit ideas into one tweet, without losing the meaning of their message. One trend that is seen all over social networking sites that is functional on twitter is the hash-tag. A hash-tag is the symbol “#” followed by a funny phrase without spaces. Even the 6th man shirts supporting the basketball team have the hash-tag phrase “#winning” on the bottom of them.
Facebook is so popular and open, that sometimes people are hesitant to share bold statement, or private matters. Twitter is different. When you create your profile, you can choose the option to have a private account. This means that if someone wants to follow you, you have to approve their request to do so first, protecting your tweets from being seen by strangers. Twitter is also a simpler site, with no profile information or confusing layouts and updates. Twitter doesn’t require you to use your real name, which is where worries from a lot of parents and students come from when it comes to inappropriate posts that potential jobs or colleges could see. On your profile, you may fill out an “About Me” and choose a background image too.
Twitter is currently a place where most parents do not follow their kids, while on Facebook this is often untrue. Twitter is a safe haven for teenagers to release anger on schools, work, and parents without worrying about what adults will read their thoughts or judge them.
Twitter is slowly climbing in numbers, as users push their friends into making accounts. Twitter is faster paced, short and sweet, and very exclusive. You only see the tweets of the people you want, making Twitter a friendly and fun website. Twitter’s popularity climb is simultaneous to Facebook users frustration of the limits of the site. As Facebook begins to fall in activity and interesting posts, Twitter is bulking up full of lively users, who are ambitiously tweeting.