Chat sites and Social Networks
Online communication is rapidly becoming an essential life skill. Children are ‘exploring digital communities’ as soon as they learn to type! New sites are launched every day to attract the young minds starting with gaming and text message to sharing pictures and videos. It is of utmost importance that they learn to become responsible netizens. They need to know what are the pros and cons of using these sites. Let us quickly look at some important points before talking about some popular sites and apps.
Advantages of Chat and Social Networking Sites
1. It is now easy to keep in contact with old friends and colleagues and find the ones who have lost touch with,
2. Social networking sites allow users to create networks of like-minded people which could benefit them professionally.
3. People on social networking site share topics which interest them like news and current events.
4. Each social platform offers an array of tools which helps a business to advertise and target specific group.
Points to be careful about while using these Sites.
1. Social networks can be used for Cyber crime or bullying of innocent children. Parents should be careful and aware of what sites their children are visiting and also filter the web content.
2. The information you post on the internet is available to almost everyone. You should be careful while sharing your personal details.
3. You can modify the settings to control who can have access to your information.
4. You must take responsibility for your own safety.
5. Spending too much times on this sites reduces the amount of time for physical activity.
Let us now learn about some commonly used chat and networking sites.
WhatsApp is a messenger that first smartphones which can be downloaded for free. It was founded in 2009 by ex-Yahoo Employees. It uses the internet to send messages, images, audio or video etc. It can also be used for Group Chats. The cost of using WhatsApp is significantly less than sending normal text messages. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and has billion users worldwide. It is the biggest online messenger app being used today.
Facebook is a popular free social networking website founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004. It allows registered users to create profiles, upload and share photos and videos send messages etc. It lets people keep in touch with friends family and colleagues. The site is available in 37 different languages. Facebook is the world’s largest social network with more than 1 billion users worldwide. Since Facebook has become so powerful, other websites have worked to integrate with Facebook. This means that with a single Facebook account you can sign into different services across the web.
It has many features like the following to, name a few,
1. Creation of groups with common interests.
2. Creating events which allows members to publicize an event and invite guests.
3. Anyone over 13 years of age and with the valid email ID can become a member.
Snapchat
Snapchat is another extremely popular private messaging app. It is used for creating photos and short videos, which are automatically deleted after they have been built for a few seconds. The most appealing feature of a Snapchat is the ‘self destructing’ feature which attracts the teenagers.
The message is of a Snapchat are called as a Snaps. You can use a Snapchat not only to share media files but also to send money to your friends.
Twitter is a free social networking microblogging service. It allows the registered members to broadcast short posts which are called tweets. The members can broadcast tweet and follow other users tweets using multiple platforms and devices. Anyone can follow anyone on Twitter.
To create a conversation thread or to connect the tweet to a general topic, members can add hashtag (#) to a keyword in their post. The tweets are limited to 280 characters.
We Chat
We Chat is a Chinese multipurpose messaging app developed by Tencent, which you can download for free. It was first released in 2011 and by 2018, it is one of the world’s largest stand alone mobile app. It is called ‘Sugar App’ because of its wide range of functions and platforms on which it can be used.
It has a unique ‘Shake Button’ feature which is not seen in most other messaging apps. You can use it to find other We Chat users in the world who are shaking their phone too. You can then immediately start chatting with them.
Instagram is a mobile, desktop and internet based photo sharing application. It allow its users to share pictures and videos with their followers either publicly or privately. It is also owned by Facebook. It was first created and launched by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010 only for the iOS operating system. They launched another version for Android devices in April 2012.
Users can apply various digital filters to their images, and add locations through Geotags. They can also link their Instagram account to their other social media profiles which enables them to share photos to those profiles as well.
Google+
Google+ is an application of Google which was launched in June 2011. You can post photos, update status to interest based communities, group different type of relationships into Circles. It has also multi-person instant messaging text and video chat called Hangouts. You can also tag locations and edit and upload photos to private cloud based albums.
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