In the natural case of life all things must eventually come to a end. There will eventually be a time when David Cameron and that other bloke hang up their boots to the pleasure of many young teens around the country. There will also be a time when Ryan Giggs hangs up his football boots and begins his lifelong dream of becoming the English Hugh Hefner. But thats a story for another day, what I'm going on about is the social networking website Facebook which after being on top for so long seems to finally be losing its status as the top tog of social networking sites to celebrity favourite Twitter. But why is the question? To answer this you have to look at a number of things, one being what both Facebook and Twitter represent and bring to the lives of the public and also the history of other social networking sites.
Since the existence of the internet we've seen websites come and dissapear just like a pimple on many occassions. On other occassions some websites are seen to be more stubborn pimples and come and slowly but surely dissapear and a website that will reluctantly agree with this is MySpace which since 2008 has gone from being the internets favourite child to being that forgotten child who doesn't get the time of day from anyone. But how has MySpace, the once most popular social networking site, ended up being just a distant memory now? Well most of the blame for that can probably be put on the emergence of FaceBook who's goal to connect friends and people from all over the world pretty much ended any hope MySpace had of maintaining dominance. This perhaps highlighted MySpace's biggest problem, people were only using it because there wasn't really any other alternative apart from Bebo which is just quote frankly a joke of a website. Although with MySpace you could still connect with other people, it was mainly still a site focusing on the promotion of unknown music acts rather than a place to connect and interact with friends, something which FaceBook was able to take full advantage of and is what led to FaceBooks dominance. However although FaceBook has improved tremendously since then it too is faced with the problem MySpace faced not too long ago..... The emergence of another social networking beast.
Twitter shot into the spotlight in late 2009 and although FaceBook managed to maintain its dominance for a period of time, it finally looks as if Twitter is about ready to dethrone the once untouchable website. But what is twitter doing that Facebook has been unable to do? Well the answer to that is whilst Facebook has been busy promoting groups, fan pages, games to play via Facebook and their 'Facebook chat' Twitter has taken a entirely different approach and can perhaps be seen as the social networking site for the mature due to mostly its simplicity. Its invention of things like the famous hash tag has proven to be a genius invention and has perhaps given twitter its own unique trademark. This can also be seen through the use of 'trending topics' on twitter where the most popular topics being discussed in the world right now is shown which not only keeps users up to date with current affairs but also at times allows users to receive news via twitter faster than anybody else, and certainly faster than anyone on Facebook would receive it.
However the main reason for the new found dominance can arguably be put down to one thing only..... The power of the celebrity! I noticed this when last week I asked one of my friends if he had a twitter account and his reply to that was "no, only celebrities should have twitter". This signifies how celebrities have transformed twitter into their own personal playground to not only promote themselves but most importantly of all interact with fans. It is this interaction with fans why many young girls make twitter accounts (for example @Bieber4eva) with the sole intention tweeting Justin Bieber in the hope that he one day applies, and this applies to all celebrities. Which makes you think that if celebrities are using twitter to promote themselves, then perhaps twitter is using celebrities to promote twitter.
Jazzy's Verdict: Although twitter in my opinion will undoubtly become the most popular social networking website in the world, I do not think that Facebook will find themselves in the same position that MySpace did a few years ago. Whilst MySpace had to deal with threats from Facebook, YouTube, Bebo and Twitter the only threat Facebook really face is from Twitter which doesn't make it likely for all of their dominance to be completely stripped from them.
