I signed up for a MySpace account way back in the day. It was right after the site went “public.” I remember getting a message or an IM from a girl I was friends with in high school telling me she just signed up for this site and didn’t want to be the only one on it. She asked me if I could join. I checked it out and thought “why not?” it seems harmless! At this point hardly anyone had a MySpace account. I think I had 5 friends on it when I first started. That number got significantly larger as time went on. For the past year or so the number of “friends” has remained constant. I log into it maybe once a month but I never update it. It is a great social networking site for music so if I do add new “friends” they are musicians who have some of their songs on the page and some tour information.
Moving right along…Facebook. I heard about Facebook when I was probably in my first year and a half of college. I remember you were able to see people’s profiles because everything was public but were unable to sign up for an account unless you were at one of the “lucky” schools. Of course, my first school, FIT was not one of those schools even though we had official e-mail addresses. After leaving FIT I attended NCC. For my 2.5 years there we did not have email addresses, and if there was an email address for the student no one knew what they were! I know a lot of the people I went to school with wanted to get themselves on Facebook but still could not! Finally by 2006 I attended a school (CUNY Baruch) with real e-mail addresses so I could join Facebook! I joined the first possible chance I had. The site had opened up to a lot more schools or maybe it was anyone who had a school e-mail address. A few years later I am still very active on Facebook. I do not see myself abandoning my page anytime soon!
Next came along Twitter. I remember getting an e-mail in September or October 2008 from the Hillel at my school telling me to join this thing called Twitter. I received several e-mails from them before I finally signed up sometime in October. I think my first tweet was along the lines of “What is this site?” The only person I was “following” was the Hillel at Baruch. I rarely updated my Twitter because I was not sure what it was and I had no friends on the page. I think it was in January of 2009 that the site started to pick up. I was starting to follow people and people were starting to follow me. Once John Mayer (@johncmayer) signed up for a Twitter account I feel that the whole site exploded! Everyone and everything has a Twitter account now. I did have Twitter before John although I rarely used it. I did not get an account because of him but I did use it more because of him. I made friends through the site because John joined Twitter so they did too. I feel that it is a very addicting website and most of the time very stupid. This is coming from a person with over 9,000 tweets. If I think it is stupid then why do I still have an account? The answer is because of all my wonderful friends! For right now it is the best and easiest way that we can communicate. I have a Twitter account because of them not because of any musician, celebrity, or company.
And as for Tumblr I am not really sure. Maybe I signed up for it back in November when John Mayer first posted on here. I think this page will be “hot” for a little while and then fade away until the newest, latest, and greatest social media/networking site pops up.
Share with me “Why did I sign up for this?”
