Facebook is a very popular social networking service with more than one billion active members in a short span of less than a decade and a half. Why is it called Facebook? Facebook is the directory consisting of photographs and names of the students and staff, which was distributed to the students at the beginning of the academic year in some American Universities so that they would get to know one another better. Since the Facebook website was similar to the Facebook directory, it was named as Facebook.
The founders of the Facebook website are Harvard University students who started it on February 4, 2004. In the beginning, it was available only for Harvard University students. Then, gradually, it expanded to other University students and then to high school students. Now it is open to the public with the age limitation of above 13 years.
After registration, the user can create a profile, invite friends to join, upload and share photographs, chat their hearts out on anything, receive notifications if there is any update on the status or profile, etc. They can form their groups of friends and give a name to that group.
From April 2011 onward, the users were allowed to make live voice calls through Facebook chat and can communicate with anyone around the world and can even leave voice messages. Not only voice calls, on July 6, 2011, they launched video calling with the collaboration of Skype as its partner.
Facebook has its office in Hyderabad, India since 2010 as "Facebook India Online Services Private Limited". With this, they have joined with other biggie companies like Google, Oracle, IBM, Dell, etc. to have a shop or a company of their own. But it has been banned in China, Pakistan, Iran, Vietnam, and Syria due to religious discrimination, anti-Islamic, etc.
It has been found that of the more than one billion active users, 9% of them are fake, as they do not check the authenticity of the people. So beware of impostors.
Twitter is another popular social networking website in which users can tweet messages and read the tweeted message of other users. The users who have registered can send and read messages. They can access their account either through their computer or mobile application. Twitter has mobile apps for all the leading smart phones like iPhone, Android, Blackberry, etc. The maximum character length of the message is 140. It is popularly called as the "Internet's SMS".
It is based in San Francisco and has offices all around the world. It was introduced in July 2006 and instantly became a big hit with more than 100 million users worldwide. Mostly Twitter is used by celebrities like politicians, movie stars, sports persons, journalists, singers, etc. so as to be in touch with their fans and followers.
It has its pros and cons, one wrong and controversial tweet might result as the biggest scandal of the day. Everybody needs to be careful while typing. But the brighter side of it is we get to know all the juicy details about our favorite stars and as the number of viewer-ship increases, the person's popularity increases three-fold.
Twitter is banned in Egypt and Iran as a revolution against them was organized to protest against them. It does give way to organize protests and these revolutions are named as "Twitter Revolutions". Also banned in North Korea and China too.
It is an excellent tool for emergency communications especially during earthquakes, tsunami, tornado warnings, etc.
But the fraudulent ones do prop up at times posing as a popular personality. So the authentications and validations of all the accounts are very important. After checking the authenticity of the person or a company, Twitter places a blue color check mark on the right side of the user's page just to ensure the reliability of the individual especially eminent popular people. But still, 5% of all the accounts on Twitter is fake.
Have fun but be cautious. Let's not get fooled.
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