Social Networking – We have to try it, naturally.

First there was email, then personal Web pages, then My Space, then Face Book, then Twitter. 

Email is convenient, simple, fairly safe and easily controlled by the sender and receiver.  Web pages are flashier than email and provide more of a thrill for the creator of the page than email.  How cool, the Internet and World Wide Web provide an instant audience for anyone who wants one.

My Space was pretty cool too.  A personal web page, so to speak, could be easily built by the poster within the My Space site and the poster could send and receive messages on their page.  It also enabled the poster to accept or decline posters to their page or make their page, mostly, private if they wanted to.

My Space took off so well it soon became bogged down with too many applications and advertisements which overloaded the page and made it download really slowly.  This made the page less easily accessible and/or enjoyable to use. 

Face Book streamlined My Space, cut out some of the bells and whistles, offered more privacy options and became the new favorite social networking site.  Then came Twitter; Twitter streamlined social networking even further and enabled the user to spew one-liners without revealing any information about themselves other than their name and post.  Perfect!

New and some exciting social networking tools were introduced to consumers through the Internet and World Wide Web.  Consumers, in the midst of pushing the applications of these tools to their limit, are figuring out the pros and cons to these tools and are fine tuning them accordingly. 

The Internet and World Wide Web applications seem to be among some of the only products of the sciences that their results cannot be tested and quantitatively proven before release to the general public.  Good or bad, where and how these tools fit well into our society is unfolding naturally.