My first experience with social networking was in 6th grade when I attempted to create a Geocities site from a template. Long story short, not many of the features worked a smoothly as I had hoped if at all and after a few hours of trying, I gave up. Things like getting 3 pictures to show up separately in each of the templates 3 picture slots proved impossible, not to mention that none of my friends were experimenting with Geocities. At the point I was testing it out, to my knowledge, it wasn’t really a social networking thing yet. It was more of a build-your-own website type of service which intrigued me, but again, technical difficulties made me lose interest quickly.
My next venture into social networking was when most of my friends were first experiencing the idea, in 7th grade with the advent of AIM. Now we didn’t have to talk to each other on the phone, we just logged onto AOL Instant Messenger and chatted away. It my first real taste of the disconnection the Internet can inflict on us. On AIM you were pretty much free to bash on anyone else and the magic of the Internet somehow protected us from harm.
When high school came into the picture, so did MySpace, my first experience with social networking as we know it today, with profiles, messages, bulletins, and all that other good stuff that make up the stereotypical social networking site. I was one of the hold out kids that didn’t care for it at the beginning and was finally coaxed into getting one. Once you have one, it’s hard to stop though and at that point I was hooked.
Once a senior in high school, with college right around the corner, Facebook made its debut into my life. It was MySpace but “cleaner.” It was fresh, clean, and somehow more mature. It had all the same mainstay features that MySpace had plus a few more. After Facebook, most people start listening to little birds and not caring what they have to say. Twitter tends to go hand-in-hand with Facebook and these are the only two I currently use.
Geocities was never really a full time thing, just an afternoon of experimenting. MySpace became too overpopulated and buggy to keep trying to deal with and after Facebook came around, MySpace was left in the dust. With the advent of texting, AIM mostly faded into the past. I use Facebook on a daily basis and usually post a tweet every couple days. I enjoy social networking and it has become an integral part of our society that most people take for granted.
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