BLOG: SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

Comparison of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Facebook is fairly well designed in my opinion. They've made several changes throughout the years so it does take time to adjust to it, but most of the content is displayed in an easy to understand manner.

There's the profile picture, cover photo (which takes up about 25% of the profile's page). There's a huge wealth of options where you can find information such as age, email, education, etc. You can also browse friends of the user. Posts are displayed in the middle, and aren't terribly hard to understand. There's no hard-cap on character limits.

Overall, there's lots to do on Facebook and it's core functionality works great. There are a ton of options that users can check out to customize their page to their liking, such as privacy and other information. Unfortunately there aren't any themes or design choices that we can change.

Twitter is much much simpler than Facebook and Tumblr. All you really need to know for Twitter is 1) tweeting, 2) replying, 3) retweeting/favoriting, 4) hashtags, and 5) following other users. None of these are difficult to understand and it's probably the easiest social network to get started in. User options are not as complex as Facebook, which is understandable.

Instagram is pretty much the photo-only barebones version of Facebook. I have the least experience with using Instagram, but from the short time I used it, it's fairly simple to put content onto it, and most of the features are self-explanatory. Overall it looks clean, and is intuitive to navigate and use.

Lastly, Tumblr is a more complex site than the above three. There's a ton of uses for Tumblr, and it can sometimes be a bit difficult to find what I want, and how to do it. You can blog on Tumblr, you can post pictures, and popularity of a post or picture is stated in how many notes it has, which is basically how many users liked/reblogged it. This is probably the least intuitive platform for me, but I can see the appeal. There's many communities of users here, from artists, to writers and bloggers etc.