Continuing on social networking, there are various social network and media sites out there that have certain strengths, interesting points about them, and also weaknesses that cripple the site in terms of format or content. The points of comparison to be discussed will be between: Facebook, Myspace, Friendster and Crunchyroll.
In terms of comparison on content, it will be Facebook vs. Myspace (The age old battle) and Friendster and Crunchyroll (Because these sites are not only chatting but have an interactive element of gaming and videos).
For Facebook, its content involves things such as fan pages, businesses of interest, gaming, private messaging, instant chat, the news feed, and other clickable places on the website. With the fan pages, you can check out what your favorite businesses, celebrities, and businesses of interest near you are doing in their news feed, see their pictures and get any updates necessary to keep in the loop. Gaming where you can do quizzes, farmville and other games to keep yourself occupied while on the site to stay on longer, you can invite people to come and play with you, though this feature is sometimes unanswered and becomes annoying, when you are in fact the one being invited to 100 different games. Then the messaging system is pretty simply laid out, type in the first letter of the name of the person you want to message and you can. Or use the bottom right chat enabled live chat function where you can see who of your friends is currently online and chat like its the 90's Aol Instant Messenger service. Lastly, the big news feed about information from friends, businesses, pinned notes from other websites, shared content from other websites by other facebook users truly keeps you informed. Facebook has a great layout and you can never get lost. The only shortcoming is when searching for people, people can go by nicknames that you cannot find them, but I guess that is a great privacy function indirectly.
For Myspace, it was archaic until recently when it changed its layout and content into involve more of the endless profiles (now celebrities and musicians are prolific in content), more musical content available (it had its roots in endless band and music pages from unknowns but it seems to be delving into more wellknowns than ever), and it has a new radio and video content. It is going in a more media and less social networking direction it seems. The front page is newsworthy, has a place where you can connect your facebook to it as per other endless applications does, but its very confusing and bulky in layout even though it is more modern. It seems like the front page profiles is more about entertainment and celebrities and seeing their pages, to network or "try to" contact them and know more about whats going on in their lives rather than your nuclear friends, family, and friends of friends. It feels like its going in an MTV format and direction instead of its roots like how Facebook has now dominated. The content is quite lacking because if you only want to chat and do not care about celebrities or music, then its definitely not the website for you.
Now if we look at the dimensions between Crunchyroll and Friendster its similar yet different.
For Friendster, this seems as if its a gaming online environment with forums for everyone to connect. There is the playbox where you can purchase game titles for your computer and at home enjoyment. There are different genres of games like mmorpg, rpg, fighter, fantasy, and adventure. I do love the fact that you can challenge and play with others, like the popular genre of mmorpg, massive multiplayer dimension type games. The forums available to discuss from games on the site, playbox games, and other hot off topics available. This site even though it is amazing, the graphics and resolutions are easy on the eyes, and creates a virtual community through games, it is limiting that if one does not play games or cares for it, its not the site for them. There is no place to view whats happening in their lives through pictures and such like Facebook does.
Crunchyroll on the other hand is a virtual community as well, it is not as interactively multi-dimensional as Facebook is but it has a forum as well as a store section and english and other language subbed animes of every genre for fans of Japanese Animations to watch. The forums can be discussions on actors of asian descent, dub foreign actors, off topic discussions, or inquiries into actual just subbed episodes where fans can grieve or celebrate what happens. Again, this is a specific audience and its limiting in the fact that you may not like animation videos, so its not your type of site.
But, even if its not someone's type of site, they can very well become fans of it and meet others like themselves and have discussions through the many forums on how they feel.
It goes to show there is a social network site out there for any and everyone.